The Braves are signing veteran left-hander Chris Sale to a one-year contract extension, as reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan. The Wasserman client was slated to reach free agency this coming winter but will instead stick with Atlanta. In doing so, he’ll make $27MM in 2027 on a deal that also includes a club option for the 2028 season. According to MLB.com’s Mark Bowman, that 2028 option is valued at $30MM. The Braves subsequently announced the deal.
Sale, 37 next month, may be entering his late thirties but remains as effective as ever. Atlanta acquired the southpaw prior to the 2024 season in exchange for Vaughn Grissom in a deal with the Red Sox that turned out to be a coup for the Braves. Since joining the organization, Sale has pitched to an otherworldly 2.46 ERA with a 2.38 FIP, with a strikeout rate of 32.2% and a walk rate of 5.9%. Those elite rate stats earned him his first career Cy Young award in 2024 but come in just 303 1/3 innings of work total because of a rib cage fracture that sidelined Sale for a portion of the 2025 season.
Injuries were the story of Sale’s career for several years prior to his arrival in Atlanta. For the first nine years of his career, the lefty was utterly elite with seven All-Star appearances and six top-five finishes in Cy Young award voting for the White Sox and Red Sox. That portion of his career ended in emphatic fashion as Sale struck out then-Dodger Manny Machado to secure the 2018 World Series for Boston, but come 2019 Sale struggled for the first time in his career. While his peripherals remained elite, he posted a pedestrian 4.40 ERA and was limited to just 25 starts due to injuries. He’d go on to make just nine starts between 2020 and 2022 before returning to the mound for most of the 2023 season with a 4.30 ERA in 20 starts.
Now that those injury-marred days are more or less in the past, however, Sale will look to continue the high note he’s found in Atlanta as his career begins to wind down. Both Sale himself and president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos recently indicated to reporters (including Bowman) that they’d like to see Sale remain in Atlanta for the rest of his career, and now he’ll remain under club control until the end of his age-39 campaign. Sale told reporters (including Chad Bishop of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) after news of the extension broke this morning that the deal came together follow his and Anthopoulos’s comments earlier in camp.
“He said what he said, I said what I said, and we just kind of looked at each other like, ’Are we serious?’” Sale said, as relayed by Bishop. “And I called [my agent] and was like ’Hey, call Alex, figure something out.’ You know, we made our pitch, they made their pitch, and we just kind of met in the middle. I mean, I feel like this was [done in] like, a week.”
Sale will be looking to not only put the finishing touches on a compelling Hall of Fame case but also lead the Braves back into the postseason after a rough 2025 season. He’s the undisputed ace of an Atlanta staff that looks very intimidating when at full strength but now figures to enter the season without either Spencer Schwellenbach or Hurston Waldrep. Instead, Sale will be joined by Spencer Strider, Grant Holmes, and Reynaldo Lopez in the rotation as things stand, with a handful of depth arms in competition for the fifth starter job. It’s a group that could clearly use an additional quality arm, but it remains to be seen if Anthopoulos will manage to add someone like that to the mix before the season begins. Whatever may happen with the rotation in 2025, however, the Braves can now move forward with the assurance that one of the game’s most elite hurlers will be staying in town for the foreseeable future.
