“It depends,” Bill Walton answered.
He was working a college game when a flagrant foul was called on a player who slammed an airborne opponent to the floor.
The play-by-play man asked if perhaps the defender was just playing good, hard basketball.
“It depends,” said Walton, “on whether the kid who was fouled is your kid.”
Many solutions to what ails us can be reached through kids.
This spring training, Goose Gossage, working with the Yankees, was simplistically dismissed and even condemned as “an angry old white man” for his indelicate, i.e., vulgar, spew about how baseball indulges what he regards as insufferable:
Home run-posing, including flamboyant, ain’t-I-great bat-flipping — specifically as demonstrated by Toronto’s Jose Bautista — indifferent base running, especially to first, and all other acts of immodesty and less-than winning baseball.