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Hall of Fame MLB pitcher Goose Gossage has been a vocal opponent of some of the elements that have seeped into the modern era of baseball.  

One of those is instant replay, which Gossage expressed his lack of fondness for Tuesday at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Florida, where he’s serving as a guest instructor for the New York Yankees. The New York Post‘s Kevin Kernan relayed the former pitcher’s comments:

Now you sit there for five minutes and wait for a f—ing replay. And half the time, you can’t even tell.

Who’s died in the last 100 years because of a bad call? They say, ‘Well, they lost a World Series and the kid lost his perfect game.’ I said, ‘Who died?’ Leave the human element in the game. You cannot take the human element out of baseball because it is the fabric of the game.

Gossage also dismissed criticism from those who believe he’s become a curmudgeon, stating, “They can say all they want to about ‘old school’ and the game has passed me by. Let me tell you something: The game has not passed me by.”

Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports is prominent among those who would strongly beg to differ:

It’s evident the 64-year-old pioneering reliever wants to allow the field umpires to do their jobs as well as possible. Some would argue that the advent of replay leads to more correct calls.

But Gossage has a point about replay slowing the pace of the game.

Although baseball may traditionally be America’s pastime, it doesn’t excite people as much who are growing up in an era of instant gratification brought on by rapid technological innovation. The NFL has taken over as the USA’s most popular, visible major sports league.

Reigning National League MVP Bryce Harper recently argued baseball lacks excitement in an interview with ESPN the Magazine‘s Tim Keown. Harper said players should essentially embrace showboating and exuding their personalities to spice up the game:

Baseball’s tired. It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.

Those remarks don’t reflect a paradigm Gossage would take to particularly well.

Preserving the integrity of baseball is important, but if it comes at the expense of ignoring potential enhancements made possible with modern technology, baseball will likely be viewed more widely as antiquated.

That doesn’t seem to impact Gossage’s thoughts. He called the analytic side of baseball that’s grabbed the spotlight in recent years “revenge of the nerds,” per Kernan.

Although Gossage’s testimony comes from a place of loving the game, he may be doing more harm than good by not acknowledging the other side of the argument. Being such a staunch opponent of evolving the sport also diminishes the impact his words have as an MLB legend.

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Baseball Hall of Famer Goose Gossage let his dissatisfaction with the current state of Major League Baseball be known during a tirade Thursday in which he went after Jose Bautista, per Andrew Marchand of ESPN.com. 

On Friday, he continued to air his grievances, this time directing his anger toward reigning National League MVP and Washington Nationals star Bryce Harper after the 23-year-old told ESPN’s Tim Keown that baseball is a “tired sport.”

“What does this kid know?” Gossage asked ESPN Chicago 1000’s Waddle and Silvy show on Friday (via Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post). “This kid doesn’t know squat about the game, and [has] no respect for it.”

Gossage, who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2008 following a 22-year career, played through two players strikes, the evolution of modern-day free agency and baseball before contracts reached as high as $300 million. 

Hearing Harper say that players “can’t do what people in other sports do” struck a nerve with Gossage:

Here he is making millions of frickin’ dollars; that’s great. I’m happy for all the players and all the money that they’re making, because it’s hard-earned by all the players that came before these guys. Ninety percent of these guys never went through a strike, a work stoppage. They don’t know the blood sweat and tears that has been spent on what these guys are making. All we wanted was a piece of the pie. Marvin Miller did that, Curt Flood, from on up. My career started out on the first strike in 1972, and it ended in the last one in 1994, when we lost a World Series, which should have never happened, but it did. … We fought for everything these players are getting. So let me tell Bryce Harper something: go look at the history, figure it out and quit acting like a fool. …

… You know, it seems like money has really changed this game. And not for the best. And not for the better.

Harper isn’t one of those players making exorbitant money quite yet. He’s in the last year of a two-year, $7.5 million deal and is scheduled to hit arbitration after the 2016 season ends, according to Spotrac. 

However, Gossage should know that Harper is a student of the game and a hard-nosed one at that. In 2013, he told Jon Saraceno of USA Today that Nationals fans will see “a fiery guy no matter if I’m sick, hurt or on my deathbed.”

He even compared his early career exploits to those of Mickey Mantle and said he studied George Brett and Pete Rose. So Harper might know a little more than Gossage gives him credit for.

Gossage, though, didn’t just focus on Harper. He also addressed players who celebrate after achieving successes on the field:

I went in the clubhouse and shook hands. … We went in the clubhouse and went by each guy’s locker and congratulated one another. That’s how we did it. We didn’t celebrate in front of everybody. But now, that’s not the way. Now, it’s all about “dig me, dig me, man, I just hit a bomb.”

No matter how angry he gets or how loud he yells, Gossage won’t be able to stop the change that has come to MLB.

In the age of social media, viral videos and hashtags, players are being celebrated for celebrating. That’s something that won’t change, either, unless MLB imposes some type of ruling on bat flips and fist pumps, which would be an asinine thing to do. 

Instead, if players do take offense to demonstrative displays on the field, let them police things like they always have. Whether it be a pitch that buzzes a bit too close to the batter or getting in an opponent’s face, those opposed to celebration will find a way to combat it.  

But as it stands, Gossage going after the game’s biggest players won’t accomplish anything.  

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Legendary Major League Baseball reliever Goose Gossage is joining the chorus of people who believe bat flips and analytics are evil and have no place in the sport. 

Speaking to ESPN.com’s Andrew Marchand, Gossage singled out Toronto Blue Jays star Jose Bautista as being bad for baseball: “Bautista is a f–king disgrace to the game. He’s embarrassing to all the Latin players, whoever played before him. Throwing his bat and acting like a fool, like all those guys in Toronto. [Yoenis] Cespedes, same thing.”

Bautista became an Internet sensation in October when he flipped his bat after blasting a three-run homer in Game 5 of the American League Division Series against Texas. It was an expression of his excitement at putting his team ahead in a win-or-go-home game, but Gossage evidently thinks he was showing up his opponents.

Bautista took to Twitter to offer what seemed to be a response to Gossage:

Gossage’s vitriol wasn’t used all on Bautista. The Hall of Famer took aim at advanced analytics and most of the people who run MLB teams: 

The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it. I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the f— they went and they thought they figured the f—ing game out. They don’t know s—.

A bunch of f—ing nerds running the game. You can’t slide into second base. You can’t take out the f—ing catcher because [Buster] Posey was in the wrong position and they are going to change all the rules. You can’t pitch inside anymore. I’d like to knock some of these f—ers on their ass and see how they would do against pitchers in the old days.

Let’s ignore for a minute that pitchers today are throwing harder than they ever have to focus on another part of Gossage’s discussion. When did having more information about players become a bad thing?

That’s what advanced analytics and sabermetrics really is, just a way of evaluating talent. Andrelton Simmons can’t hit, yet he’s a star in 2016 because everyone can see his defensive metrics at shortstop over the last three years blow every other player at the position out of the water. 

The one good and fair point Gossage made in between looking like Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud is calling Milwaukee fans out for giving Ryan Braun a standing ovation: “Ryan Braun is a f–king steroid user. He gets a standing ovation on Opening Day in Milwaukee. How do you explain that to your kid after throwing people under the bus and lying through his f–king teeth? They don’t have anyone passing the f–king torch to these people.”

It’s ironic that Gossage’s comments came out on the same day Tim Keown of ESPN The Magazine published an article in which Washington Nationals superstar Bryce Harper talked about wanting more personality in the game:

You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig—there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.

There’s always going to be a divide, for whatever reason, between players from previous generations and today’s athletes. Even a megastar from a different sport, like Stephen Curry, faces criticism from Oscar Robertson because the game is played differently today than it was decades ago. 

Gossage is certainly allowed to have his own opinions, but there doesn’t have to be this constant bickering about how baseball is played and run now because teams know and understand more things today than they did when he was playing.   

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