Nice boost and boot
Sale lifts Sox before ejection
BALTIMORE — It finally happened.
In his 47th start with the Red Sox, Chris Sale gave fans what they’ve been curiously anticipating since he was traded to Boston before the 2017 season. Sale lost his temper. It wasn’t quite scis-sors- to-the alternate uniforms anger, but
Sale was steaming hot as he walked off the mound in the seventh inning of the Red Sox’ 5-1 win to complete the sweep of the last place Baltimore Orioles yesterday.
With a tired bullpen, the Red Sox badly needed innings from their No. 1 starter. Sale gave them six and was trying to go further when he walked the first two batters of the seventh. When manager Alex Cora took him out, six-plus innings of anger with home plate umpire Brian Knight finally came out.
Sale cursed and yelled at Knight, who ejected him before he made it to the dugout. Sale slapped hands with teammates, than ran up the dugout steps to holler a bit more before making his way to the clubhouse.
Sale had no regrets.
“Stuff happens man,” he said. “I mean I’m not big on apologies or going back on things I’ve done. It happened, you know? It is what it is. We’ll move forward.”
It was Sale’s second career ejection, his last in 2015 when he reportedly approached the Kansas City Royals’ locker room and began banging on the door in the eighth inning.
He was fired up yesterday, knowing he had to go deep and perhaps desperate to get a win after the Sox lost in each of his last three starts and were just 7-7 with him on the mound heading into this one. Sale threw 109 pitches, 69 for strikes, on his way to his sixth win of the season.
None of the pitches called as balls during those walks were considered strikes by MLB’s pitch/ fx technology. But Knight appeared to miss a strike call on Manny Machado in the first inning, another on Craig Gentry in the second and an egregiously bad miss on a belt-high pitch on the outside part of the plate against Joey Rickard in the third.
“There are going to be points in the season, points in the game where stuff happens,” Sale said. “No one is perfect. Obviously I lost my cool a little bit. That’s going to happen, too. I like competing. I feel like getting something taken away from me, I get pretty emotional. At the end of the day we’re human, stuff is going to happen. It is what it is.”
Sale was frustrated all game, but kept his cool until the seventh when he was finally replaced by Justin Haley, who made his Red Sox debut with three innings of one-run ball.
“You put people in bad situations when you (get ejected early in the game),” Sale said. “The bullpen has worked their butts off this year. We’ve leaned on them quite a bit. If you do something stupid in the second, third or fourth inning, I still have a job to do. I try to push that to the wayside and deal with it later. I try to go out there, do my job, fill up innings and try to win a ball game.”
There was little to complain about from a fan’s perspective. Sale did his job and he made it look easy, allowing just two hits and striking out nine. But he walked four batters, one of which led to an O’s run in the seventh. His walk rate is now approaching his career high of 2.4 batters per nine innings.
“I didn’t see the ejection; I heard it,” said Sox manager Alex Cora. “I was talking to the guys on the mound and they were like ‘oh, he just got ejected.’ I went down there and asked what happened and just let him know how we felt about the strike zone. But it is what it is.”
The Sox offense scored three runs off Orioles starter Yefry Ramirez, who made his major league debut and went 41⁄3 innings.
Mookie Betts started the scoring with a solo homer in the third inning, his 18th of the year and first since coming back from the disabled list. After scoring three in the fourth, the Sox got another in the seventh when J.D. Martinez hit an 0-2 pitch about shoulderhigh for an opposite-field home run, his 22nd of the season, one behind MLBleader Mike Trout.
A sweep over the lowly Orioles, a team gearing up to trade Machado while headed for the first overall pick in next year’s draft, was enough for the Sox to feel good heading into their series with the first-place Mariners.
“Just a boost of energy for us going into Seattle,” Sale said.