Chris Sale lasted only three innings against the Orioles, but does the fact he came out firing offer hope for the future?

The day, however, was salvaged by the heroics of Adam Duvall, whose two-run, two-out walkoff homer in the bottom of the ninth gave the Sox an unlikely victory. Nonetheless, it was the starting pitcher who was under a microscope in the first Boston iteration of Sale Day since the 2021 postseason.

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While Sale came out firing in the first at 95 miles per hour to strike out leadoff hitter Ramón Urías, the Orioles — ever adept at anagrams — quickly turned that “Wow” into an “Oww.” Sale allowed a one-out single to budding superstar Adley Rutschman before a hanging slider got belted by Ryan Mountcastle for a two-run homer to left-center.

While Sale bounced back — unleashing a pair of 97-m.p.h. heaters to Anthony Santander on a slider — he grooved a first-pitch fastball to Austin Hays, who smashed a solo homer to center.

Sale worked around a pair of base runners in a scoreless second, but again lacked both luck and precision in the third. A pair of one-out infield singles put the lefthander in a bad spot, and a misfired full-count fastball to lefty Gunnar Henderson put him in a worse one. Sale got another infield dribbler — this one, a run-scoring fielder’s choice by Jorge Mateo — and could have escaped with a 4-1 deficit.

But with two outs and a 1-2 count, Sale turned not to his slider — usually the source of sorrow for lefties — but instead to his fastball against the lefthanded Cedric Mullins. The pitch was center-cut, and Mullins sent a rocket into the center-field bleachers for a three-run homer that put Baltimore ahead, 7-1.

There’s no hiding from the line: seven runs on six hits and two walks in three innings, along with six strikeouts. The contest marked the 12th time in Sale’s career that he allowed at least seven runs, and the fourth time he’d done so in three innings or fewer — the previous one coming in his Opening Day egg in 2019. It was the 10th time in Sale’s career he’d allowed at least three homers.

The homer by Mullins was particularly glaring, given that it marked just the fourth time in Sale’s career that he’d given up a homer on a two-strike pitch to a lefty. A peak Sale would have seen a strikeout of Mullins as an almost automatic outcome.

Instead, his inability to throw his slider near the strike zone left him leaning far more heavily on the rest of his repertoire. But while he mostly proved able to throw his fastball for strikes, he couldn’t command it in the zone, resulting in the homers by Hays and Mullins.

So: Disaster. Right?

Not entirely. Sale showed premium velocity, topping out at 97 m.p.h., and getting swings-and-misses when he could locate it at the top of the zone. He also featured his best changeup in years, getting five swings-and-misses on the pitch, his most in a game since 2019, and his sinker mostly produced weak contact. His stuff was fine. His ability to execute with it was not.

Command and control have always been givens of Sale’s repertoire. If Saturday simply marked a blip — a pitcher who proved unable to harness the emotions of a return to a venue where he’d been waiting to take the mound for eons — then there were elements that could serve as building blocks.

Even so, there are no guarantees with a 34-year-old who is coming back after missing as much time as Sale has. While Sale has joked that his arm is just 31 years old even if he is 34 — a reflection of what has been a roughly three-year layoff — he is not picking up where he left off prior to his 2020 Tommy John surgery or, for that matter, when he was last one of the game’s most dominant pitchers in 2018.

And so the Red Sox remain in the initial stages of a journey into the great pitching unknown — both with Sale and their staff as a whole. The team’s ability to defy forecasts of its mediocrity likely relies on its ability to get pitching performances that vastly surpass modest expectations. Instead, the team has given up 18 runs to the Orioles in two games — with back-to-back season-opening yields of eight-plus runs for the first time since 2011.

That start is hardly predictive of what will happen, but it’s certainly not promising. For the Sox to stoke spring hope, they’ll need more than what they’ve gotten — and they’ll need Sale to prove that Saturday represented an initial speed bump on the road back to excellence.

Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @alexspeier.