Steven Wright’s Boston Red Sox teammates have been outspoken in the past regarding performance-enhancing drug use in Major League Baseball, and that hasn’t changed just because a Boston player was nabbed.
Red Sox pitcher Rick Porcello weighed in on the knuckleballer’s 80-game suspension, saying his opinion from 2016 hasn’t changed and there needs to be stiffer penalties for PED users. Chris Sale also touched on the situation, saying even though the team wishes it could change the outcome, everyone just needs to “roll with the punches.”
“It’s tough. You know, I don’t want to get into it,” Sale said, via WEEI.com. “You know, this is obviously a matter between us. But, yeah, I mean that’s something that we didn’t obviously see coming up or see having to deal with. But, you know, it happened. There’s nothing you can do about it. Obviously we wish we could change it, but it is what it is. You roll with the punches and you turn the page and keep moving.”
When asked how it reflects back on the Red Sox, Sale kept his response simple.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s—like I said, we’re a group,” he said. “You know, we win together, we lose together and when things go bad it’s all on us. Like I said, it’s obviously something that we didn’t want to worry about, but at the end of the day, there’s no going back on it. So you just put one foot in front of the other and try to make right by it and just keep moving.”
Losing Wright for the first half of the season certainly hurts Boston’s bullpen. Though he wasn’t in the running to be the next closer, Wright proved his worth as a relief arm last year.
