When Hunter Strickland's fastball, clocked at 98 mph, sailed into Bryce Harper's right thigh in the eighth inning Monday, the violence erupted at AT&T Park, an otherwise uneventful Memorial Day affair between the San Francisco Giants and Washington Nationals transforming into a Tarantino movie with eye black.

Harper, enraged, charged at Strickland, and fisticuffs quickly ensued after Harper's embarrassing attempt to hurl his batting helmet at the right-hander. Immediately, the benches and dugouts emptied, and the ugliness metastasized. You can see for yourself here.

As the chaos unfolded, though, Buster Posey, the Giants' inimitable catcher, simply watched as if he'd paid for a ticket, conspicuously hanging back instead of diving into the mass of large bodies punching and kicking each other.

"Well, I mean, after it happened, I kind of saw Harper point, and then next thing you know, he's going out after him," Posey told reporters. "Those are some big guys tumbling around on the ground. You see Mike Morse - he's about as big as they come - and he was getting knocked around like a pinball, so ... be a little dangerous to get in there sometimes."

Having spent his entire adult life in professional baseball, Posey has seen enough of these ridiculous displays of machismo to know that no benches-clearing brawl ever ends well, even if the player wearing the same uniform as him manages to repeatedly punch the face of the player wearing the different uniform. Regardless, there are suspensions meted out, and often, it seems, some player emerges from the fracas and heads straight to the disabled list. Just last year, Joaquin Benoit, then of the Toronto Blue Jays, tore a calf muscle running in from the bullpen to provide backup during an impromptu game of pushy-shovy with the New York Yankees.

This whole song and dance is just so stupid. Buster Posey is not stupid.

Conversely ...

"You never want to get suspended or anything like that, but sometimes you just have to go get 'em," Harper said following the melee. "You can't hesitate."

Here's the thing, though, Bryce: You really, really don't have to "go get 'em." And if, in that pregnant moment of hesitation, you inadvertently happen to think about your next action, you definitely should hesitate.

The culture of toxic masculinity that lingers in MLB clubhouses leaks onto the field, playing out before the baseball-consuming public, in various ways, whether it's Kevin Pillar hurling a homophobic slur at an opponent who quick-pitched him, or Bryce Harper deciding to "go get 'em" because a pitcher he embarrassed in the postseason three years ago decided to plant a 98-mph heater into his thigh. This is bad for baseball, as commissioner Rob Manfred will now have to suspend the best player in the National League and one of the game's most marketable stars for a not-insignificant length of time, but it's worse, truly, for kids who watch baseball.

Not to go all Helen Lovejoy on you, but continued, and unexamined, adherence to MLB's antiquated code of compulsory violence - and, again, these rules are unwritten because writing them down would help illustrate how inane they are - only serves to perpetuate this ridiculous notion that it's okay to punch people when you think they've wronged you on a baseball field. It's not hard to imagine that people who punch other people over perceived slights on the diamond would employ that same approach in other arenas, too.

So for Posey to stand down, presumably knowing that less evolved people - maybe even some in his own clubhouse - will call him soft, or worse, is tremendously encouraging. That some players have begun to disabuse themselves of the asinine OH-MY-GOD-HE-MAY-HAVE-INTENTIONALLY-THROWN-A-PITCH-AT-MY-TEAMMATE-IT'S-TILLY-TIME-BOYS attitude that has colored baseball's self-policing policies for more than a century suggests baseball may one day rid itself of these foolish, destructive episodes.

More players, it seems, just need to be like Posey. That has never not been true - less than three weeks removed from his 30th birthday, Posey has an MVP award and three World Series rings - but it's never been more true than right now.