Chris Sale Surprisingly Doesn’t View Red Sox Tenure As Success

There isn’t much Chris Sale didn’t do over the course of his seven-season run with the Boston Red Sox.

It might be easy to forget about all of his success, as the last few years of that tenure were marred by injury. But he was once the most dominant pitcher in Major League Baseball.

Sale recorded the final out of the 2018 World Series and helped bring a title to Boston in just his second season with the franchise. He started two consecutive MLB All-Star Games. He finished second and fourth in Cy Young voting in 2017 and 2018, respectively. He recorded 308 strikeouts, a Red Sox record, in his debut campaign.

Sale was awesome, but even he isn’t immune to recency bias.

The 34-year-old appeared on “Foul Territory” this week and told hosts Scott Braun, A.J. Pierzynski and Erik Kratz that he didn’t view his tenure with the Red Sox as a success.

“In my mind, no, it wasn’t,” Sale said, per Chris Cotillo of MassLive. “I only had one full healthy season there. I was there for seven years. I only pitched tip-to-tip one time, in 2017, and that was actually the best year of my career from like a stat standpoint — 2018 was probably close to, if not, the second best year of my career. I missed some time, but had a great year, and we did end up winning the World Series.

“I didn’t do anything post-contract, which bothers me. If we would have won the World Series after I signed that contract, I’d have felt maybe a little bit better. But I got traded there, we won a World Series and they obviously made a big commitment to me and rewarded me for having two good years and bringing a championship to that city. ‘Hey, we’re going all in on you. We’ve done our end of the bargain. Here’s five years. Here’s a big contract. Now you get to go keep doing what you’re doing.’ Because they saw those two previous years and that’s what they thought they had signed up for five more years. And it wasn’t.

“The best years of my baseball career were in Boston, but also the worst years of my career were in Boston. And if those worst years weren’t, just to be completely honest, so (expletive) expensive… It’s a kick, it’s a gut punch. It’s not a fun thing that I’ll be able to look back on and remember about my life and my career. But I learned a lot from it. I’d like to think you can take some good with bad and roll with the punches. It’s a mixed bag, but overall, I guess in short answer, if it was one word, I would say no.”

Sale was traded to the Atlanta Braves earlier this month, bringing an end to his stint in Boston. He’s undoubtedly right in the fact that he wasn’t able to live up to the contract on the field, but there are few around the Red Sox who would claim he wasn’t able to do so off the field.

He’s a bit hard on himself, but that’s what makes him so great when he’s healthy.