Chris Sale ejected before pitch in balk call fallout

This one started Saturday. Braves and Yankees tied up, Spencer Jones parked on third, Austin Wells at the plate in the 5th, and umpire Dan Merzel rang up Chris Sale for a balk that walked the go-ahead run home. Sale is a hybrid-delivery guy, which under MLB's rulebook means he has to verbally declare windup or stretch for every hitter, not just set up and go. He'd made the declaration for the previous batter, Jose Caballero, but not for Wells, and that's the gap Merzel jumped through.

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Chris Sale lost his mind after he was called for a balk that allowed the go-ahead run to score for the Yankees

Rob Friedman's breakdown made the case that this wasn't some fluke gotcha call — it's the David Price hybrid-windup rule, and Sale has apparently been getting away with skipping the declaration for years without it ever being enforced (@PitchingNinja, 2086229454964261067). That's the part that had Sale so heated: not that the rule exists, but that nobody flagged it on him before. Crew chief Dan Bellino backed his umpire afterward, telling a pool reporter Sale simply didn't declare windup for Wells like the rulebook requires of hybrid guys.

The Yankees ended up winning that one, and the ump scorecard for Merzel's game — Braves 4, Yankees 5 — quickly made the rounds as fans relitigated the call (@UmpScorecards, 2086460419334398293). Jomboy's Lombard also went off in that same game, working two straight ABS challenges into a walk against Sale before going deep, which didn't exactly cool the temperature in the Atlanta dugout.

Sale wasn't even scheduled to pitch Sunday, but he wasn't done talking. As the umpiring crew walked past the Braves' dugout before first pitch, Sale started in on them — and got ejected before a single warmup toss was thrown, with words exchanged directed at Bellino over the whole balk saga.

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Umpires ejected Sale pretty much as soon as they walked on the field

Braves closed out the series finale 2-1 in 10 innings, with Bellino behind the plate for that one — the kind of tight, extra-innings finish that makes every close call from the weekend look even bigger in hindsight (@UmpScorecards, 2086823624191697369). For a Braves team fighting for playoff positioning, a rules technicality nobody enforced for a decade suddenly becoming a live wire against a division-race opponent is exactly the kind of thing that lingers past one series.