But these goosebumps came at the memory of Finnegan, who struck out Crawford to end the inning, and then slammed his fist in his glove and unleashed a primal scream.

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“I get chills thinking about it,” Harper said. “It’s just like, that’s the fire this game needs. That’s the emotion. Those are the guys you want on your team. He’s not showing anybody up. Come on.”

If there is an ongoing debate about baseball’s ancient codes – and there is – Harper is at its epicenter. His comments in a lengthy feature in ESPN The Magazine, loosely distilled to his thoughts that baseball is “tired,” merely built on a theme he talked about with me last summer, when he considered how other sports have such recognizable, marketable standard-bearers and said, “I always thought to myself I want to change that aspect of baseball.”

So when Hall of Fame reliever Goose Gossage told ESPN that Bautista, the prodigious Blue Jays’ slugger, is a “disgrace to the game” for such bat-tossing moments, the obvious person to turn to is Harper.

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“I love Bautista,” Harper said. “I love the way he plays. I love everything about him. I 100-percent agree with what he did in the playoff game, because you never know what you’re going to do. You don’t want to be a machine. You don’t want to be a robot. You don’t know what’s going to happen. He hits a homer. You don’t know, as a human being, what you’re gonna do. You have no idea. …

“That’s him. That’s the way he plays. That’s the way Toronto is. When you have a whole country rooting for you, you’re telling me you wouldn’t go crazy in that whole situation, in that moment? You’re crazy if you think that.”

Gossage followed, on Thursday, by addressing Harper, specifically, on Chicago’s ESPN 1000: “This kid doesn’t know squat about the game, [and] has no respect for it,” two claims which are demonstrably false, but never mind that.

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The problem with Harper … no, no … the problem for Harper is that he is such a focal point that his every utterance on the subject is parsed and picked over. His response: I. Don’t. Care.

“When I said it was the tiredness of the game, I don’t care what people say, but it wasn’t like the game is tired, that I don’t like baseball, because I absolutely love baseball,” he said. “But it’s the fans in the stands that get tired of watching a game that is very boring. ‘It’s a pitcher’s duel.’ Well, what’s fun about a pitcher’s duel unless it’s Max Scherzer and Matt Harvey, guys who play with emotion? That’s fun. That’s legit.”

He’s rolling now. Get out of the way.

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“You just have to understand how to do it,” he said. “If a 10-year-old’s flipping his bat and doing stuff, I don’t like that. He needs to learn how to play the game and how to go about it to get to the next level. But should he have fun doing it? Absolutely.

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“Little kids don’t want to play the game of baseball because they’re bored. They get bored. They’re like, ‘I want to go play basketball or football,’ because at that young of an age, it’s fun. And they see that, Cam Newton and all these guys, they’re running the ball and having fun and doing all these touchdown things. As a young kid, that’s fun. Going onto a baseball field, until you’re about 12 to 13, that’s when you can really start to understand baseball better, the fact of knowing, ‘Hey this is fun, I enjoy coming out and learning and playing the game of baseball.’ But there has to be a balance.”

Because he is the reigning National League MVP, because he is just 23, because he is in ads for Under Armour and Gatorade and goodness knows what else – shoot, just because he’s Bryce Harper – people will have opinions about each and every word. Take it away, Sergio Romo, Giants reliever, to the San Jose Mercury News.

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“Don’t put your foot in your mouth when you’re the face of the game and you just won the MVP,” Romo told the paper. “I’m sorry, but just shut up.”

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“I saw that,” Harper said. “But he has to understand: I’m standing up for him.”

Romo, for years, has celebrated significant outs with all manner of gestures.

“It’s personal expression,” Harper said. “I love that. But if a closer strikes you out, and you complain about it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, he can’t do this celebration’ or whatever, you can’t do that. You walk away and say, ‘I hope I get you tomorrow night, because if I do, you’ll know.’

“I always try to respect the game, because I admire so many people from ages before me. And I know the history of the game, and I understand it completely. But, it’s a new generation of the game. You have to adapt to those circumstances. You have to adapt to that part of life. … You have to live in the times that you’re in. I think everybody’s adapting to that, slowly but surely.

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“On the flip side of that, I’m going to respect everybody I play against. If you’re down 10-1, and you showboat a homer, and you jog around the bases, then you deserve to get hit. If you’re in spring training, and you hit a homer and pimp it, what are you doing? But if it’s Game 5 of a playoff series? Hello? Absolutely.”

This, Harper believes, is a necessary change to his sport, one that will help it grow, particularly among people of his generation and younger. He is, of course, not surrounded by like-minded thinkers. Dusty Baker, his new manager, grew up in a time when, as he said Friday, if you show a hint of showmanship, “you get knocked on your butt.” As a father of a teenage ballplayer, Baker is attuned to the game’s battle between a new flamboyance and its buttoned-up past.

“I’m not as firmly against it as I was before,” he said. Because times change? “Yeah, not necessarily for the better. But times have changed. And if the opposition don’t mind you showing them up, then why should I mind? Personally, if it was me, it’d be a little different. But ‘me’s’ a long time ago.”

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Bryce Harper is living in the here and now, and pushing toward a different future. And if you think he’s going to avoid the conversation, try to stop him once the question is asked.

“I just think so many people have wanted to talk about it, and wanted to say it, but never have,” he said. “I just really think that it’s something that needs to be put out there.”

And then, he thought about Werth’s home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 4 of the 2012 National League Division Series against the Cardinals, the one that extended the Nationals’ season, after which Werth emphatically pointed to his dugout.