Why Chris Sale’s strikeouts could not contain the Dodgers in Game 3

Freddie Freeman missed Chris Sale’s first sinker in the fourth inning, a 97.7 mph pitch outside the recorded strike zone. Sale threw another sinker, this one 95.7 mph and also classified outside by Baseball Savant. Freeman hit it at 103.2 mph and a 34-degree launch angle for a home run to right-center. Getting a hitter to swing outside the zone had produced two very different results in two pitches.

The homer made the Dodgers’ lead 3–0. Sale finished NLDS Game 3 at Truist Park with three earned runs on seven hits over five innings, seven strikeouts, no walks and 95 pitches. Los Angeles won 3–1 on October 6 and took a 2–1 series lead.

Sale’s fastball was faster than his regular-season average, and the slider remained a useful strikeout pitch. The complete record nevertheless shows repeated contact: 16 balls in play, 10 at 95 mph or harder. Both homers came on pitches other than the four-seamer. Explaining the loss requires looking beyond the strikeout total and beyond the two swings that cleared the fence.

A familiar mix with more speed

Sale threw 41 four-seamers and 40 sliders, respectively 43.2% and 42.1% of the outing. Their season shares were 41.4% and 39.9%. The sinker stayed close to its normal share at 8.4%, while the changeup fell from 10.3% to 6.3%, six pitches. This was largely the established fastball-slider approach, rather than a wholesale repertoire change.

The comparison uses 2,574 physical pitches in all 27 regular-season starts, March 27 through September 23, and matches the official pitch total. It excludes both this game and Sale’s earlier postseason work. The four-seamer averaged 97.2 mph against Los Angeles, compared with 96.1 in the season sample, and reached 100.3. The slider averaged 80.2 mph, compared with 79.8.

Sale’s batting-side distribution was also fairly familiar. Right-handed hitters saw 67 of his 95 pitches, 70.5%, compared with 75.6% of the regular-season sample. He threw all eight sinkers to left-handers and all six changeups to right-handers. Those six changeups are a small sample; the homer on one of them does not establish that abandoning the pitch would have improved the outing.

Six early strikeouts did not make the innings short

Sale struck out three hitters in each of the first two innings. The slider finished four of those six strikeouts, and the four-seamer finished two. Against Ohtani in the first, he used four sliders around a 98.9 mph sinker: a miss, a ball, the sinker for a called strike, another ball and an 82.9 mph slider for the strikeout.

The work still required 42 pitches to record the first six outs. Betts singled to open the first, Teoscar Hernández reached on Ha-Seong Kim’s fielding error and Tucker singled in the second. Sale had no walk, but strikeouts and baserunners extended his path through the lineup.

The slider generated seven misses in 17 swings across the full outing and finished five strikeouts. The four-seamer generated only two misses in 21 swings, even while providing 10 called strikes. Sale’s final strikeout came in the fifth, when Smith fouled off two fastballs before missing an 82.2 mph slider below the recorded zone. The breaking ball continued to work after the scoring inning.

Contact was already accumulating before the home runs

The Dodgers put five balls in play during the third, an inning in which Sale produced no miss in eight swings. Betts and Smith singled, Freeman hit a 101.3 mph flyout and Teoscar Hernández hit a 103.2 mph flyout. Ohtani reached on catcher interference before Rojas lined out with the bases loaded. Sale kept the game scoreless, but the lack of a run did not mean the contact had disappeared.

For the full outing, Sale’s 10 hard-hit balls came from 16 balls in play, a 62.5% rate. His regular-season comparison was 141 of 402 measured balls, 35.1%. Game 3 contact averaged 97.9 mph, compared with 87.5 during the season. Sixteen balls are not a stable estimate of his future contact quality, but the damage was spread across more than the two home runs.

The four-seamer accounts for much of that traffic. It produced 10 balls in play, seven of them hard-hit, averaging 98.2 mph off the bat. It did not allow a home run. Its difficulty was that Los Angeles repeatedly put it into play, including hard-hit grounders and flyouts that kept innings active or depended on fielders completing the outs.

Two secondary pitches supplied the decisive damage

Pages opened the fourth with a 102.8 mph single on a four-seamer. Tucker lined out before Enrique Hernández saw two changeups. The first, 92.1 mph, was a ball; the second, 88.9, finished inside the recorded zone near its lower boundary. Hernández hit it 106.8 mph at 33 degrees for a two-run homer to left.

After Betts grounded out, Freeman’s two-sinker at-bat added the third run. The first pitch induced a miss and the second became a homer even though both were classified outside the zone. That is a useful limit on a chase-rate explanation: an outside-zone swing can be damaging contact. The measured locations alone also cannot tell us whether Sale missed an intended target.

Teoscar Hernández then hit an 80.2 mph slider at 108.4 mph and 21 degrees, but Dubón caught it in left. The fourth ended with five hard-hit balls among six balls in play. A hitter’s failure to reach safely is not the same as a pitcher avoiding hard contact, just as Freeman’s homer does not make all eight sinkers unsuccessful.

The last inning could not reverse the earlier cost

Sale had thrown 62 pitches through three innings and 80 through four. His fifth took 15 more: Smith struck out, Ohtani flew out and Rojas grounded out. It was his only inning without a baserunner, although the last two outs left the bat at 101.3 and 97.7 mph. He departed with the bases empty and no inherited runner; all three runs charged to him had scored in the fourth.

His four-seamer averaged 97.6 mph on eight pitches in the first, reached an inning average of 97.8 on nine in the third and averaged 96.4 on nine in the fifth. Even the last inning remained slightly above the full-season average. The inning samples show changing speed, but they do not establish that fatigue caused the contact or the home runs.

Sale finished with 10 misses in 44 swings, a 22.7% whiff rate, compared with 395 in 1,304 swings, 30.3%, during the season. His seven strikeouts were real evidence of pitches that worked, especially the slider. They were not a complete description of the other plate appearances.

In a later start, the useful test is whether the four-seamer again produces frequent contact despite its speed, and whether those balls remain this hard-hit. Game 3 supports a specific explanation: the slider supplied strikeouts, while sustained contact lengthened Sale’s work and two secondary-pitch home runs supplied the scoring. Extra velocity did not prevent either part of that result.