Legend of a thin man

Programming note: I went long on one topic today, but watch out for a bonus Bandwagon with a very special guest dropping tomorrow.

His pants looked too big. No, it was more than that: This young pitcher would make any pair of pants look too big, unavoidably baggy, awkwardly bunched at the ankles. Standing perfectly vertical, he was skeletal. Then he folded that stick frame into a pile, whirled out of the jumble, hitched into a wide, sidewinding lefty attack and let go.

There was nothing inside that uniform; there was an impossibly powerful something in there.

The image of Chris Sale was indelible from the jump. So was his wild intensity on and off the mound. You could read it as a response to his own implausibility. Defiance, or adamant self-assurance, a vehement argument with the assumed assessment of his ability. If you couldn’t believe what you were seeing, well, screw you.

The other night, about 16 years after his debut as a gawky reliever, 37-year-old Sale shut out the Dodgers in a 1-0 masterpiece. He ramped his fastball up over 100 mph in the process, believe it or not, for the first time since 2018.

It seems the real measure of a legend is how much they blur the line between truth and myth, and how little we are inclined to interrogate it.

You may have heard, may have even told others, that the late Dolly Parton wrote two of her all-time classic songs, “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You”, in the same day. That story’s squishy factual footing underlined her status — not in spite of the clouded reality, but because of it. Its ubiquity proved that people were inclined to accept the unlikely. (Long after the story evolved into lore, Parton herself said it was possible, because the originals were back-to-back on the same cassette tape.)

When a performer racks up enough fantastical feats, they make any assertion seem possible, and at some point the exact boundaries of the truth cease to matter against the evocative backdrop. A legend is recognizable when rendered in abstract art, a gimme in a round of Taboo, an impossible opponent in a game of Two Truths and a Lie.

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He went over his manager’s head to get an MRI that kept him in the rotation. He broke his foot roundhouse kicking a home intruder. He cut up White Sox throwback uniforms with scissors.

Sale fights, always has.