Sale hit by liner, expects to be OK for season opener

FORT MYERS, Fla. — This was not the sight the Boston Red Sox envisioned in Chris Sale’s final spring training tuneup: Their ace crumpled on the ground, knocked off the mound by a line drive.

Sale quickly got up, flexed his leg a few times and walked off the field under his own power Saturday. The AL East champions called it a bruised left hip, and Sale said the injury wasn’t serious and wouldn’t jeopardize his opening day start Thursday at Tampa Bay.

“I don’t see anything lingering from this,” Sale said. “Looked a lot worse than it really is.”

Sale was struck by a liner off the bat of Houston’s J.D. Davis in the first inning. A day earlier, San Francisco ace Madison Bumgarner sustained a broken pitching hand when he was hit a line drive and will miss at least a month. X-rays were negative. “When it first hit me, it kind of got me in the hip, but got the nerve. So it shot all the way down to my foot. So, that’s what kind of made me worried,” he said. “I was telling them when I was out there, `Give me a minute. It’ll come back. I’ll be fine.’ They didn’t want to wait, so came in here, got it evaluated, looked at, figured out nothing series, just a bruise.”

“It kind of just shocked me more than anything, that initial blow,” he said.

The lanky left-hander considered himself fortunate.

“That’s another reason we’re thankful it hit me where it did,” Sale said. “I don’t have a whole lot of padding anywhere on me, but if I’m going to get hit, somewhere in the hip or the butt’s going to be the place to go. Better than a rib, arm, hand, even the face. So this was best-case scenario.”