Look, we can sit back and pretend this is all the product of a new generation, that there’s no way Jesse Winker would have survived 10 minutes in baseball’s golden age when men were men and frontier justice ruled the day, and everyone played with their heads down and their mouths shut.
We can pretend the single-most talked-about moment of Babe Ruth’s career wasn’t an absolute ode to trash talking. Nobody knows for sure if Ruth really pointed to center field moments before launching a Charlie Root fastball there on Oct. 1, 1932, Game 3 of the World Series.