Chris Sale is out of Game 162 for the Atlanta Braves

At the end of the Breaking Bad episode “Crawl Space,” if you hear the sounds of someone laughing in a similar way to Walter White as he lay down in the crawlspace, don’t worry about that strange sound. That’s just me. At this point, all you can do is laugh to keep from crying, as the Atlanta Braves have suffered another major injury setback before the most important game of the season.

In fact, Chris Sale was plagued with back spasms during the second game of tonight’s doubleheader against the New York Mets. As a result, Grant Holmes will start in his place.

As it turned out, Sale struggled quite a bit heading into his last start against the Reds in Cincinnati on September 19th. Although the start was already scheduled when the Braves were originally scheduled to play the Mets last week, Sale’s dreaded back spasms resurfaced, and as you can hear from President/GM Alex Anthopoulos, the Braves simply aren’t comfortable starting today with him and will start Game 2 with Grant Holmes instead.

Luckily, Sale is the order of the day, but that largely assumes the Braves can win Game 2. Anthopoulos even said that Sale could potentially start in the San Diego series, which is a pretty wild idea. The entire day has been a frenzy of reflection from the moment this scenario became a reality, and now the Braves will be playing for their postseason lives without the man who was clearly their best starter all season. Here, too, you can only laugh at this point, as the risk of injury strikes again here at the very last point of the season.