LOS ANGELES – First J.D. Martinez walked by, and then Andrew Benintendi, and then Mookie Betts. They didn’t so much as blink at the crazy man screaming at the air. Compared to some of Chris Sale’s other antics, his dugout eruption during Game 4 of the World Series rated as rather milquetoast. His brow furrowed. His arms gesticulated. His mouth loosed a barrage of F-bombs. Boston’s ace did land one particularly sick burn on Los Angeles Dodgers starter Rich Hill, who for six innings had limited the Red Sox to a single hit: “He throws two [expletive] pitches!”

This, like David Ortiz’s dugout speech to the Red Sox in Game 4 of the 2013 World Series and Jason Heyward’s to the Chicago Cubs during the Game 7 rain delay in 2016 and Justin Verlander’s to the Houston Astros in the midst of last year’s Game 2, is bound to be elevated into the annals of oratory legend should the Red Sox win the World Series, which they’re one game from after a stunning 9-6 victory Saturday night at Dodger Stadium. The speeches share no syntactic effervescence or illuminative genius but rather abide by a rule that is worth remembering: When good baseball players get pissed off, sometimes other baseball players respond.

Now, a couple things. First, inside of any playoff dugout at any particular moment, the likelihood of someone yelling isn’t exactly minuscule. Second, most of those speeches don’t happen to be caught on camera and blasted out to the world by Fox nor do they often directly precede seminal moments of the game. To say the Red Sox scratched back from a 4-0 deficit, won Game 4 and took a 3-1 series lead because Sale told Red Sox hitters to stop being terrible during the sixth inning, then, would be to say causation and correlation are one and the same. The only thing we can say with a decent amount of certainty is that Sale’s rant petrified the youngest player on the Red Sox.

Steve Pearce rounds first base after hitting a solo home run in the eighth inning of Game Four of the 2018 World Series. (Getty Images) More

“It scared me a little bit,” third baseman Rafael Devers said.

Beyond that, it is perhaps fairest to characterize the pep talk as Red Sox manager Alex Cora did: “It was a moment.” And you know what? On a night after the Red Sox lost the longest game in playoff history – an 18-inning, 7-hour, 20-minute battery drainer, the kind of defeat that can leech itself to a lesser team and suck dry its will – sometimes a team needs a moment to remind it what’s at stake.

Whether Sale managed to do that is neither clear nor particularly measurable. For some perspective, Martinez, the slugger who was part of an incredible 0-for-42 stretch by the Red Sox’s Nos. 1-4 hitters dating back to Game 2, meandered directly past Sale mid-tirade. “I walked by,” Martinez said. “I didn’t hear it.” Martinez asked what, exactly, Sale had said and was told the part about Hill’s arsenal. He smiled. “I think I heard that,” he said.

Martinez didn’t think it was all that big of a deal because he is a hitter, and hitters understand that Hill’s two pitches – a fastball he elevates with aplomb and a curveball that’s baseball’s version of a great crossover, buckling knees with regularity – are not some puzzle solved with try-hard. At the same time, when someone with a Hall of Fame pedigree like Sale finds a situation imperative enough to do his best imitation of that guy at the bus stop – you know the guy – it tends to resonate.

And when Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pulled Hill from the game with one on and one out in the seventh inning, suddenly the two-[expletive]-pitch guy was replaced with a one-[expletive]-walk guy (Scott Alexander), who gave way to a three-run-[expletive]-homer guy (Ryan Madson). That Roberts yanking Hill somehow rose to the level of presidential importance showed that Sale wasn’t the only person with hot takes on Game 4. It also gave way to Mitch Moreland defiling the trash changeup Madson left over the heart of the plate.

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