Jose Bautista doesn’t forget.

During a game in late June, 2013, between Bautista’s Toronto Blue Jays and the Baltimore Orioles, O’s reliever Darren O’Day struck out Bautista and promptly chirped him while skipping to the dugout. The next game Bautista took him deep to left field, and told The National Post it was all personal, and that he wasn’t happy with O’Day’s trash talking.

“I told him just to keep talking like he was yesterday,” Bautista said. “He kind of ran his mouth a little bit after he struck me out. I don’t know where that came from, but I didn’t appreciate it and I let him know that yesterday — and that’s a little reminder today, that I didn’t appreciate it.”

That’s the end of the story, right? Wrong.

There was a brief dustup in September 2014 — when the submarine pitcher plunked Bautista to square accounts after a Jays pitcher hit an Orioles batter — but the right fielder took things to a different level two weeks ago. In the batters box against O’Day yet again, Bautista annihilated an inside pitch for a home run, and skipped up and down (exactly like O’Day did almost two years prior) on his way out of the batters box.

While it’s reactive and easy to call Bautista’s antics immature, that’s only because this is what an institutionalized MLB has conditioned us to think. We’re told not to like flair. We’re told to accept the countless “unwritten rules.” If someone is being overly dramatic, we are told such behavior is sacrosanct.

To Bautista, though, that’s all hogwash. The sport could use some more fireworks as far as he’s concerned. And as funnyman Chris Rock pointed out during his passionate seven-minute monologue on African Americans’ diminishing interest and participation in baseball for HBO’s Real Sports with Bryan Gumbel, baseball hates fun: