Baseball, with its quirks and superstitions, is a sport often prone to grievances and scandals, both large and small. And this season in particular, the sagas have trended toward the latter, with Uniform Gate perhaps the most striking and metaphorically resonant embodiment of the trend. And now, as the league championships beckon, another exaggerated, rather silly controversy has arisen – one that fits perfectly with our times: the war of the Rosenthal column.

On Tuesday, the famous baseball reporter in a bow tie and sideline Ken Rosenthal wrote a critical, if needlessly brutal, article about the Padres for The Athletic, his writing home for several years, which is now owned by the Times. The story, painful titled “The ‘Sinister Sling’ and the Multitudes of Manny Machado”, criticized the maturity level of the Padres third baseman while labeling the lanky outfielder Fernando Tatis Jr. a “preening peacock” and referring to all-star Jurickson Professor like a “child who pulls the fire alarm at school and then asks, ‘Who me?’”