What is "fun" in modern sports?

About four years ago I read and shared on social media this article, written in the face of a near-beanball brawl, about the "unwritten rules" of baseball. In the wake of the donnybrook between the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays earler this week, it was humorously ironic to see that old story burble up from the dark recesses of Facebook.

Baseball has been having a rather strange season in at least one respect; it seems, this season more than most, to be torn over what seems an odd question to be asked about grown men playing games: is baseball fun?

This is primarily the work of Bryce Harper, young Washington Nationals outfielder, reigning Most Valuable Player in the NL, and self-appointed provocateur of Making Baseball Fun Again. His early-season push on "fun" has garnered the kid a pretty striking amount of attention for a sport that hasn't quite known what to do with outspoken players whose production on the field has backed up and surpassed their mouths off of it, mostly because there have been so few such players.

The "fun" campaign has manifested itself in many ways, some of them regrettably like a certain presidential candidate who shall not be named here, others rather more conventional (appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon). Other players have been joining the campaign, entire teams have had their opinion solicited, and so forth and so on.

In the meantime, the un-fun parts of the game have also manifested themselves, as in that knockdown drag-out brawl between the Rangers and Blue Jays. Here is where Serious Baseball rears its head with ugly-looking consequences. When Toronto's Jose Bautista unleashed a hard take-out slide at the Rangers' Roughned Odor (RO-ned O-door, before you get confused), threw a punch at Bautista. Not the usual baseball "punch," which is more of an ineffectual shove, but a real, prepared and premeditated roundhouse punch. Odor got eight games' worth of suspension for the punch, and Bautista for the attempt to deposit Odor in the left-field seats.

Baseball (unlike, say, the NFL) has come to the conclusion that it would rather not see its players (particularly its expensive ones) end up mangled on the field, as has happened to a few catchers (see Posey, Buster) in the past couple of decades and now seems to be an issue among shortstops and second basemen. Late last season it was Jung-Ho Kang of the Pittsburgh Pirates getting wiped out by the Los Angeles Dodgers' Chase Utley, suffering an injury from which he is still recovering. As a result the Pirates were missing one of their most important offensive weapons in their wild-card playoff game against the Chicago Cubs. One can argue that MLB manages to care for its players and their health at least to some degree, or one can argue that owners want to protect their investments, or one can argue that the league would like to have its stars on the field for important things like the playoffs. And all of those three probably contain some truth.

But the business of "unwritten rules" plays into the Rangers-Jays affair, if only because of what happened in last year's American League Division Series between those two teams. Bautista, one of the more dangerous hitters in the AL, connected for a home run that gave the Jays the winning margin in the decisive game of that series, and unleashed an epic bat flip upon doing so.

Bat flips are of course evil incarnate, an invention of Satan himself.

Or that's what you'd think based on the reaction at the time.

Admittedly, Bautista's bat flip was at least as much a bat fling as flip. Pretty severe. But then, in the situation, that's not as surprising as it would seem. In the previous half-inning, due to a bizarre confluence of events, it appeared the Jays were going to be eliminated because of a catcher's return throw to the pitcher that somehow struck the bat of the Rangers' hitter before it could get back to the pitcher. That would have been far and away the most bizarre and crushing way to lose a playoff game and series in the history of history itself.

It is my opinion (probably an unpopular one, but that's hardly new in this blog) that for Bautista to be unemotional in that situation would have been incredibly dishonest and false. That was a huge emotional moment, with tons at stake.

Somehow, though, Sam Dyson, the Rangers pitcher, decided that the bat flip was all about him.

Pro tip, pitchers: when a batter hits a climactic home run to win a ballgame and especially a playoff game and series, the last thing that hitter is thinking about is you. You simply are not important enough to "show up."

Now I don't think that anybody was exactly having "fun" in that moment back in October. And this goes to my concern with Harper's "fun" campaign. And also this goes to why I consider this story worth blogging about in the place of the usual subject matter of this blog.

Part of the problem with football and its traumatic effects on too many brains is that football, along with other sports, has assumed a position in society way beyond what it can or should ethically sustain. It's too big and too expensive and too much of an idol.

And idols aren't fun. Not even American Idols.

Also: fun is a nice part of sports, even on the more individual non-professional level, but that's not quite everything that there is to sports.

There are far stronger forces at play in games -- like catharsis, probably what was happening with Bautista back in October.

But there are things missing, almost as if by design, in big-time sports that can't quite be solved with a call to "make baseball fun again."

When the title of my blog applies so broadly across sports ("it ain't a religion, son, it's ... ), "fun" just isn't strong enough to be the answer to the question.

First of all, you have to figure out what the question is.

(To be continued...)

The Flip.