Old school baseball? Not for me

"Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn't care. Because you got him. That's part of the game."

- Bryce Harper

"Bautista is a f-ing disgrace to the game. ... He's embarrassing to all the Latin players, whoever played before him. Throwing his bat and acting like a fool ..."

- Goose Gossage

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

You can have your brand of baseball. Give me the fools. Give me Jose Bautista throwing his bat. Give me Jose Fernandez staring into the dugout. Give me Fernando Rodney shooting arrows into the sky. You can have your small ball, your drag bunts, your induced double plays. Give me the home run, the DH, a swing through strike three.

You can have your 1950's nights, your Levitt houses, your radios crackling from the back of the garage with Marlboro Red baritones in the summertime dusk.

I'll take the streets of Santo Domingo, the tufted grass of Alameda, the bright lights of Vegas. I'll take it in HD, on a big screen, with all of the velocities and trajectories the data can provide.

Give me the bigger, the faster, the stronger, the fastballs that sit 95, the curveballs that bite like rocks skipping on lakes, the hitters that can somehow make contact with both of these pitches and dispatch them outside the field of play. I like it loud: the wood, the rawhide, the leather, the bat flips, the fist pumps, the stares, the handshakes, the sound of a home crowd with its heart ripped out, the deafening silence of reality sinking in.

You like it your way, I like it mine. I like power pitchers, power hitters, power rankings, but, more than anything, I like the power these things seize from the powers that be, the truth that they speak: to the establishment, to the status quo, to the reactionaries, to those who claim ownership of the national pastime of the land of the free.

I mean no disrespect, unless you mean to suggest that your game trumps mine, in which case I mean all the disrespect you can possibly infer, because it isn't your game anymore. You don't get to define what it means to respect it. You don't get to decide "the right way" to play it. One man's "right way" is another's dirty, reckless slide. Perhaps a broken leg is less appealing than wounded pride.

Or perhaps not. I understand your perspective. I get the appeal, the ethos, the reflection of a nation you want to see: a game played in the dirt, with credit awarded for sacrifice, where running it out still counts for something. I understand why you love it. Now understand me.

If Bautista is a disgrace to the game, then give me your game disgraced. Goose Gossage is a disgrace to mine, and to all of the American players who played before him, who long for an era that was nothing more than an illusion, built on the backs of the people it oppressed, the tired vanguard of a tired game that never adequately represented the nation that claimed it.

The game you decry is a game that has always existed in certain sections of the world - sections that might lack the capital required to dictate cultural norms but are not subject to your antitrust exemption, to your monopolistic urge to dictate what this sport means, and what it represents, and how it should express itself within the parameters the rules define. The only universal truths are three strikes for an out, three outs for an inning, nine innings for a game, 60 feet, 6 inches from rubber to home. You want to stop my kind of ballplayers from playing their game? That's how you do it. Until then, I'll follow the Tao of David Ortiz.

"I respect you as a person," Big Papi told the Boston Globe early last week. "I'm not supposed to go out there and hit you with my baseball bat, but the damn round thing that is coming at me, I'm trying to break it. So all this little crying that is going on in the baseball game in today's day, people need to stop, man. People need to focus on what is good and what is not. If a player is good, let's enjoy it."

That's the game I enjoy. Give me the swag, the pimp, the heart on the sleeve. Goose Gossage vs. Bryce Harper? You can have the reliever. I'll take the MVP.