If David Price has been wondering just what, exactly, Red Sox fans expect from their ace, all he had to do was pay attention yesterday. All he had to do was watch Chris Sale mow down the Yankees.

When Sale trotted out to take the ball in the eighth inning of a 1-0 game in which he’d already thrown 107 pitches and struck out 12, the crowd of 36,936 bellowed its approval. Here was a guy who wanted the ball and when he got it kept firing it past a collection of helpless Yankee batters until manager John Farrell took him out after he struck out Gary Sanchez for the second out of the inning, finishing him off with a 95-mph fastball followed by an 82-mph slider in the dirt that had Sanchez waving at a pitch he had little chance of hitting.

When Sale turned the ball over to Craig Kimbrel with Aaron Judge coming to bat, the crowd roared its approval of another sparkling outing by the Red Sox’ best pitcher and perhaps the American League’s best.

Some would have liked to see Sale finish what he’d started and he was probably one of them but Kimbrel fought off Judge’s persistence, finally getting him on a flyout to right to end the inning. Unfortunately, the closer gave up a game-tying blast to Matt Holliday to open the top of the ninth and you could hear the grumbling from Swampscott to Skowhegan. Why in the hell didn’t they just let Sale take care of his own business?

Pitch count be damned. Sale was sailing along, his last two pitches before Farrell retired him so nasty Lord Voldemort must have concocted them. In the end Sale didn’t get the decision but you couldn’t blame that on him. He did his job the way Price was supposed to until a bruised elbow and a bruised ego conspired to make him both unavailable for a time and peevish for all-time.

Fortunately Price seems over the former and gets a chance tonight to duplicate what Sale did yesterday when he faces the Yankees and Masahiro Tanaka in the back end of a day-night doubleheader and that’s really all fans, or even the hated media, are looking for. If you’re a player, play. If you’re a pitcher, pitch. If you’re a very good pitcher, pitch very well very often. That’s all it takes to please the populace.

Nobody cares about your petty grievances with the denizens of anti-social media. Nobody cares if your charity bowling event raises a ton of cash or doesn’t raise a nickel. Your choice of dogs is of no real interest to the paying customers.

Those things are all footnotes, a fact Sale seems to totally understand. You won’t find him on Snapface, as Bill Belichick would put it. You won’t find him on Twitter or Instagram or in Dennis Eckersley’s face on a team plane, either. In fact, other than on the day he pitches it isn’t easy to find him at all, which is the way he likes it.

Sale understands what the Red Sox want from him and what Red Sox fans want just as desperately. They want him to pitch the way he did yesterday, when he scattered three hits and struck out 13 in 72⁄3 innings against their most hated rival.

You don’t have to be Prince Charming and you don’t need to be Darth Vader. Just be a pitcher who gets people out, which Price will have the chance to do tonight. If he does it as well as Sale did, even the blogosphere will be safe for him to traverse.

With Sale in total command until the minute he left, leading 1-0 and having shown no signs of a letdown despite throwing 118 pitches, it looked like the Sox were going to up their lead over the sinking, third-place Yankees to 51⁄2 games. That it didn’t quite work out had to leave you wondering what might have been had Kimbrel stayed in his seat and Sale had been left to finish what he started.

We all know that seldom happens anymore. We all know Kimbrel has been pitching lights out all season. We all know John Farrell went by the book. He did what the Manager’s Manual suggested, which was go to his closer.

But when someone like Sale is dealing like he was yesterday, as Earl Weaver used to say, “there ain’t no bleeping book!’’ Had he been struggling, OK. But he wasn’t struggling. The Yankees were struggling.

To be fair, just about every team that’s faced Sale the past two months has been struggling. He’d won 10 of his last 12 decisions and the Sox had won seven of his last nine starts. Yesterday was his 13th double-digit strikeout performance in 19 starts and if you base your thinking solely on past performance as indicator of future success Sale had a career ERA of 1.31 against the Yankees going into yesterday’s game and all it did was go down. Since ERA became an official stat in 1901, Eddie Watt is the only pitcher with a minimum of 50 innings pitched against the Yankees with a lower career ERA.

So the odds were on Sale’s side and the way he was dominating the Yankees was on his side, too, when Farrell went to his copy of “How To Manage A Big League Game’’ by Tony La Russa and took him out. That didn’t quite work out as he hoped but one thing sure has.

Chris Sale is working out just fine. Now how about you, Dave?