What does it mean when a notorious red-ass acts down to his reputation? By inventing slights at which to react angrily, is he upholding the unwritten roles, or violating them?

Madison Bumgarner might know, but he’s not telling.

Bumgarner, of course, is the guy who got into it with Jason Heyward in March, who got into it with Delino DeShields last July, who got into it with Carlos Gomez last May, who got into it with Yasiel Puig in 2014—twice—and who got into it with Jesus Guzman in 2013.

Agree with them or not, at least the above instances involved clear-cut impetus for his red-assery. On Tuesday the lefthander was at it again, for reasons that nobody could quite fathom.

Bumgarner struck out Padres first baseman Wil Myers to end the third inning, then, as he was walking back to the Giants dugout, decided to about-face and shout Myers down. Myers, incredulous, told him to knock it off, and benches briefly emptied. (Watch it here.)

Why?

“It was hard to tell whether Myers offended him by calling timeout, or taking too long to get in the box, or even taking too healthy a cut, by the pitcher’s reckoning, while striking out,” wrote Andrew Baggarly in the San Jose Mercury News.

Bumgarner himself did little to explain the situation, saying only that “I just wanted to be mad for a minute.”

To be fair to Bumgarner, self-motivation is an important tactic in sports. If irrational anger is what he needs to compete at peak levels—and he threw a complete-game five-hitter, so maybe it is—more power to him, so long as nobody gets hurt. (MadBum even went so far as to make up with Myers when he reached first base after a ninth-inning walk.)

That said, the Code is built around respect for one’s opponent. Bumgarner, in inventing reasons to get upset at Myers, seems to be in short supply of it. Whether this is “playing the game the right way” any more than Puig’s bat flip which set off the pitcher back in 2014 is up for interpretation, but with every outburst it appears to be less and less so.