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.