By Jimmy Carlton Sportswriter Published Mar 10, 2016 at 4:37 PM Photography: David Bernacchi

In a positively delightful interview with ESPN, fed-up Hall of Famer Goose Gossage assailed the current state of baseball, bashing everything from showy Latino players to number-crunching eggheads, taking particular aim at Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun and the Milwaukee fans who cheer him, and stopping just short of telling everyone to get off his damn lawn.

The retired reliever and apparently self-appointed upholder of America’s sacrosanct pastime was in rare form on Thursday. He called slugging Blue Jays outfielder Jose Bautista, who is from the Dominican Republic, a "f*cking disgrace to the game" and "embarrassing to all the Latin players" for flipping his bat and "acting like a fool." He also indicted Mets outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, who is Cuban, for the same ostensible violations of baseball’s unwritten rules – namely by having fun and the gall to celebrate while playing.

After presumably catching his breath, the 64-year-old purist launched into a tirade on another gear-grinding subject: the (relatively, but not really) recent trend toward analytics and the influx of Ivy Leaguers into major-league front offices. While he didn’t explicitly name David Stearns, the Harvard-educated general manager of the Brewers who was hired in October at the age of 30 no doubt qualifies for Gossage’s ire.

"It is a joke," he said. "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*cking game out. They don't know sh*t. A bunch of f*cking nerds running the game."

Gossage, who worked in broadcasting after his career was over, then offered the cursory condemnation required of any retired athlete when discussing the modern version of their sport: Baseball has gotten soft.

"You can't slide into second base. You can't take out the f*cking catcher because [Buster] Posey was in the wrong position and they are going to change all the rules. You can't pitch inside anymore," Gossage said. "I'd like to knock some of these f*ckers on their ass and see how they would do against pitchers in the old days."

Ah yes, the bygone and beloved good ol’ days of baseball, a sport with a century-long history of cheating and whose major league enforced a skin color barrier into the mid-20th century, endured an entire decade of rampant cocaine abuse and only just passed through a messy era of asterisk-marked records set by steroid-using players.

Wait, does crusty old Mister Gossage have an opinion on performance-enhancing drugs, too? You bet he does!

"Ryan Braun is a f*cking steroid user," Gossage said of the 2011 MVP who was suspended 65 games in 2013 for violating the league's drug policy. "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*cking teeth? They don't have anyone passing the f*cking torch to these people.

"If I had acted like that, you don't go in that f*cking dugout. There are going to be 20 f*cking guys waiting for you."

A reliever whose career started in 1972 and lasted 22 seasons, Gossage, unsurprisingly, is also antagonistic toward pitch counts. Naturally, he blames the babying of pitchers nowadays on (what else?) computers.

"They have been created from the top, from their computers," he said. "They are protecting these kids. The first thing a pitcher does when he comes off the mound is ask: 'How many pitches do I have?' If I had asked that f*cking question, they would have said: 'Son, get your ass out there on that mound. If you get tired, we'll come and get you.'"

You pitch until your arm falls off, kid. You don’t need arms, anyway. Arms are for laptop-using dorks who never played the game and work in baseball operations. All you need is a voice – to wistfully romanticize the past and bitterly complain about the present.

Born in Milwaukee but a product of Shorewood High School (go ‘Hounds!) and Northwestern University (go ‘Cats!), Jimmy never knew the schoolboy bliss of cheering for a winning football, basketball or baseball team. So he ditched being a fan in order to cover sports professionally - occasionally objectively, always passionately. He's lived in Chicago, New York and Dallas, but now resides again in his beloved Brew City and is an ardent attacker of the notorious Milwaukee Inferiority Complex.

After interning at print publications like Birds and Blooms (official motto: "America's #1 backyard birding and gardening magazine!"), Sports Illustrated (unofficial motto: "Subscribe and save up to 90% off the cover price!") and The Dallas Morning News (a newspaper!), Jimmy worked for web outlets like CBSSports.com, where he was a Packers beat reporter, and FOX Sports Wisconsin, where he managed digital content. He's a proponent and frequent user of em dashes, parenthetical asides, descriptive appositives and, really, anything that makes his sentences longer and more needlessly complex.

Jimmy appreciates references to late '90s Brewers and Bucks players and is the curator of the unofficial John Jaha Hall of Fame. He also enjoys running, biking and soccer, but isn't too annoying about them. He writes about sports - both mainstream and unconventional - and non-sports, including history, music, food, art and even golf (just kidding!), and welcomes reader suggestions for off-the-beaten-path story ideas.