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Chris Sale looks human against Minnesota Twins

By Jason Lowenthal |

Chris Sale is one of the most dominant pitchers in the game of baseball. He’s been named to four consecutive All-Star Games, had a run at the Cy Young Award last season, and is the league leader in strikeouts this year. So why has one of the game’s top starters struggled so much against the Minnesota Twins? Well, nobody really knows.

Entering the season, Sale had compiled a 6-1 mark with a 2.46 ERA against Minnesota in eight career starts. He also picked up two saves against the Twins back in 2012, when he was still an up-and-coming prospect being utilized in the bullpen. This season, the Twins have had his number, to say the least.

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Minnesota hasn’t been nice to Sale in 2015, tacking the Sox ace for three losses in five starts. They are the only team to best Sale three times this season. And unlike a guy like José Quintana, who has been plagued by lack of offensive support in many of his losses, Sale’s poor starts against the Twins fall almost entirely on his shoulders.

Something about the Twins has made him uneasy, so let’s look a little deeper and try and figure out what that is.

Target Field has been transitioning into more of a hitter-friendly ballpark over the course of the past six years. Through the end of last season, Target Field ranked second in the league in “Park BABIP,” a metric that ESPN devised to determine batting average on balls in play at each stadium. This year alone, it is the seventh-friendliest ballpark for hitters in the American League, yielding a runs rate of 0.994, according to ESPN. A ballpark with a runs rate of 1.000 or higher is considered favorable to hitters.

Another factor is that the Twins are fueled by players with aggressive approaches at the plate. Whereas many other teams sit back and wait to figure Sale out by the sixth or seventh inning, guys on the Twins get after him early and often. They don’t let themselves fall behind in the count without taking a hack at a pitch and more often than not, make Sale pay for a rare mistake. Swinging early in the count puts pitchers on the defensive, something the Twins have seemed to master.

This aggressive approach is what makes guys like Torii Hunter and Brian Dozier – Sox killers year after year – able to have success against someone like Sale. They don’t wait for Sale to come to them. Rather, they go on the offensive, a major part of what has led to Hunter slugging .512 against Sale and Dozier batting .306 with seven extra-base knocks versus the talented southpaw.

Sale is going to be a perennial top ten pitcher in baseball for a good part of the next decade. However, if other teams start to take a page from the Twins’ book on him, there’s a chance he could lose some effectiveness.

Next: Carson Fulmer Presents Concerns For White Sox

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