On the worst days, Chris Sale could not imagine a moment like this, the crowd cheering and his teammates hollering as he strode off the field having done his job. And there were a lot of worst days. When was the low point?
“When wasn’t it?” he said. “Honestly. When you get knocked down like that, it’s tough. You gotta collect yourself to get back up.”
The Red Sox ace was knocked down often enough in the past three years that chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom joked he was going to assign someone to find and recover the “Chris Sale voodoo doll.” Sale lost 2020 and most of ’21 to Tommy John surgery, then missed the first three and a half months of last season with a stress fracture in his rib cage, only to break his left pinky finger in his second start. Then, just as he resumed throwing, he broke his right wrist in a bicycle accident. He has made 14 starts since his 31st birthday. He turns 34 this month.
