FORT MYERS, Fla. – Chris Sale was 10 minutes into a half-hour press session when he got the first question regarding the sign-stealing cheating scandal that has poisoned Major League Baseball in this spring of 2020.
“Here it is . . . ,” Sale said with a grimace.
And there it was. Indeed.
Sale talked about all of it. He talked about getting lit up by the Houston Astros in Game 1 of the 2017 American League Division Series at Minute Maid Park. He talked about speaking with MLB investigators who are looking into possible rule-breaking by the 2018 world champion Red Sox. He talked about his relationship with former manager Alex Cora, who conspired to beat him in ’17, then called on him to shut down the Dodgers in the final moments of ’18. He talked about what he would tell his children about all of it when everything shakes out.
Sale went 17-8 with 308 strikeouts in 2017. But in Game 1 of the ALDS in Houston, the Astros routed him for seven earned runs on nine hits, including three homers, in five innings of an 8-2 loss. Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve homered off Sale in the first inning.
After the game, Sale said, “No excuses. Bad time to suck.’’
Related: So much for Chris Sale’s first postseason start
But it turns out there were excuses. The Astros had a fine-tuned electronic cheating system in place and Houston batters often knew what pitch was coming.
Does that make Sale angry?
“It sucks, but what am I going to do?,’’ Sale said. “Am I going to go hold ‘em at gunpoint and curse them out through a bunch of cameras? If I had something to say — I know those guys. I can get their numbers and text ’em and talk to them face to face or whatever. But, it happened. What are you going to do about it? You can sit around and cry about it, or I can get my ass back to work.
“I think there’s some steps to be taken. I think that we just need to get back to playing the game. . . . There’s been stuff going on around the league for years now. It’s been going on for a while and I’d like to see it cleaned up. I think we need to get back to playing a clean game and really figuring out who the best team is instead of who has a better upper hand.’’
Sale suggested some frontier justice is probably coming.
“I think the game polices itself sometimes. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I think you’re gonna see some stuff happen this year. I don’t know if it’s right, wrong or indifferent. Guys are certainly welcome to handle things however they want. Different people handle things differently and in this scenario I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way. I think some people feel more cheated than others and rightfully so.’’
Was he suspicious when Bregman and Altuve were circling the bases in the first inning of that first playoff game — with in-house fireworks erupting and the train whistle blowing beyond the left field wall?
“Yeah,’’ Sale said with a little chuckle. “I think they ran out of fireworks in Houston. That guy on the train, I must have kept his job for another year. I was like, ‘How the hell are they doing it?’ They were hitting breaking balls over the fence. Hitting fastballs up at their neck. Yeah, it crosses your mind, but what kind of idiot do you look like if they actually weren’t? I’m not going to sit here and say they actually were because I don’t have 100 percent evidence.
“They’re already an unbelievable team before you even start cheating. I think I was even more mad at the game as a whole. I’m a part of this, too. This is my era of baseball. All of our names are attached to it forever. It’s like the steroid era. Anybody who played in that time is going to be questioned. When you borrow something from somebody, you want to return it in as good a shape as you were handed it. And this game was handed to me. Essentially I’m borrowing it. I want to leave this game in a better way than I started in it. This puts a negative tone into the game of baseball for the future players of this game and it opens up a door that I don’t think was opened before.’’
Sale said he spent a half-hour on the phone with MLB investigators regarding the investigation into potential Red Sox cheating in 2018.
“You saw me play last year (6-11, 4.40 ERA), you know I wasn’t cheating,’’ he joked. “I gave them every bit of information I had. We have no reason to lie. We’ll see what happens.
“They asked me, ‘Do you want to talk to these guys?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, I do.’ Because I want to help make this right. It took 30 minutes out of one of my days in the offseason. To get the truth and to make this a better game, I’m in.
“Until [the result of MLB’s Red Sox investigation] comes out, no one’s going to believe what I say, no one’s going to believe what [anyone] says. We can sit up here as players and an organization and say all the things we want, but until the hammer drops, that’s when the truth comes out.’’
Sale got a call from Cora on the night Cora left the Red Sox.
“He had called me several times during the whole thing,’’ said Sale. “And the last one was like ‘Hey, I’m out.’
“One thing I’ve always respected about AC, he was always honest. He’ll never lie to you. I think that takes a certain level of character to do that. My opinion of AC has never changed. I love that guy to death and I’ll always be in his corner. People make mistakes, it happens. We’re human. But he was very open and honest about the entire process. That was a tough conversation, but I will always have love and respect for him and I appreciate what he did for me.’’
Sale said he never asked Cora about what went on during his playoff start in Houston in 2017, when Cora was the bench coach for the Astros.
“Nothing’s ever going to change it,’’ said the pitcher.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at dshaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Dan_Shaughnessy.