It’s no secret Chris Sale is one of the most dominant pitchers in Major League Baseball.
The Red Sox left-hander has been in the Cy Young Award conversation for seven straight seasons and finished second in voting in 2017, his first year in Boston.
With the amount of strikeouts he compiles every season and his ability to get the biggest names to swing and miss on a consistent basis, it’s shouldn’t come as a surprise that he was voted by other MLB players as the second-most intimidating pitcher the league has, just behind Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer, as discovered by The Athletic in their 2019 MLB poll.
Here’s what one player had to say about facing Sale (It comes with a NSFW warning):
“Two weeks before we even played the Red Sox, (teammates) were looking to see if Sale lined up against us. I’m like, ‘I’ve never seen that.’ These guys were like, ‘Sh-t.’”
Assuming Sale hasn’t lost any of the intimidation factor heading into the 2019, we probably can say opposing hitters will be looking to see if and when they will need to face the hard-throwing southpaw.
