Even as many tenets of baseball’s Code slip into the ether—witness the preponderance of bat flips and home plate scrums and Twitter-driven talk about no-hitters in progress—the quick pitch endures. The pitcher, having received a go-ahead from the plate umpire, hurriedly delivers ball to plate in hopes of surprising a batter who is not yet settled.

Batters do not like this. Neither does Larry Bowa.

On Tuesday, Mets reliever Hansel Robles quick pitched Darin Ruf, who, while technically in the batter’s box hadn’t yet settled in to await the delivery. Umpire Dan Bellino waved off the pitch, but Bowa, Philadelphia’s bench coach, exploded from the dugout, as did outfielder Jeff Franceour. (Ruf himself didn’t seem even mildly perturbed.)

Bowa stormed the field, directing his ire toward Mets first baseman Daniel Murphy—screaming “Fuck you” repeatedly and pointing toward his ribs as if to show Murphy where he’d soon be hit by a pitch. Murphy had tossed his bat after homering on Monday, but Bowa later denied that had anything to do with his rant.

“When you’re in the box, and the first thing you do is you check your stance, and your head’s down and you look up and the ball’s right here, someone’s going to get hurt,” said Bowa in a Newsday report. “And if it hits somebody in the face, they could get killed.”

The nonsense about Ruf’s life being endangered aside, Bowa did bring up an interesting point: Is it ever okay to quick pitch a guy? The Mets, according to the New York Post, “have been employing the tactic with some regularity.”

The quick pitch is against the written rules—8.05e, which says that “A quick pitch is an illegal pitch. Umpires will judge a quick pitch as one delivered before the batter is reasonably set in the batter’s box. With runners on base the penalty is a balk; with no runners on base, it is a ball. The quick pitch is dangerous and should not be permitted.”

The quick pitch—even those that meet criteria allowed by the rule book—is also against the Code. Baseball’s unwritten rules were established to maintain respect and fair play, and attacking an opponent while he’s unprepared is certainly not that. Wednesday came and went, however, with neither Murphy, nor anyone else from the Mets, getting plunked. Mets manager Terry Collins addressed Murphy’s bat flip by saying that he—along with the rest of baseball’s mainstream—no longer even notices such things. “You see it everywhere—I mean you see it everywhere,” he said in a NJ.com report. “And you see stars doing it. So I shrugged it off. Dan Murphy, that’s not even part of his makeup. He hit a homer and he took one second and tossed the bat aside. He didn’t really flip it up in the air or anything drastic.”

I love Bowa for his old-school sensibilities, but Collins is in the right on this one. Focusing on Murphy after a quick-pitch that he had nothing to do with, then decrying the pitch as potentially fatal, then denying that Murphy’s bat flip was unrelated to his anger does little more than paint Bowa as the crank he is. Visually threatening Murphy with physical violence makes the old coach seem unhinged. Sometimes acting the crank can make Bowa loveable. This time it just makes him wrong.