In the restless saga in which baseball aspires to become a modern game yet secretly pines for the 1940s version of itself, there are no new arguments, only new participants in them.
Generations pass, calendar pages turn, and on a Monday night in the summer of 2020, on the occasion of a pipe-shot fastball to a 21-year-old Dominican player, the game out of habit recasts for heroes and villains.
You’d think this would have been settled by now, but an hour later, asked to answer for the back end of his two-homer, seven-RBI game, Fernando Tatis Jr.