In the four years Scott Brosius played for the New York Yankees, he was a model citizen, doing the right things and saying the right things, never unnecessarily calling attention to himself. The son of an Oregon car salesman, Brosius got along well with others, killing time in the clubhouse as part of a running bridge game with bench coach Don Zimmer and Paul O'Neill.

Brosius came to bat in a big spot in Game 3 of the 1998 World Series against Padres closer Trevor Hoffman, with the Yankees working to go up three games to none. Brosius proceeded to club a long drive -- his second homer of the day -- and when the ball cleared the wall, the understated Brosius was overwhelmed by the moment. It wasn't until he saw the replay after the game, he sheepishly recalled the next spring, that he realized he had raised his arms over his head in celebration like some conquering Hercules, and he was somewhat mortified.

In Game 4 of the 2001 World Series against the Diamondbacks, Brosius watched teammate Tino Martinez mash a game-tying home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning, in a game eventually won by the Yankees. Brosius had so much adrenaline after that game that he had trouble getting to sleep; he called an old friend on the West Coast well after midnight. They agreed: You would never see anything like that again.

Hours later, in Game 5, Brosius came to the plate in the exact same situation as Martinez, with two outs in the ninth inning and the Yankees down by two runs, and the instant Brosius hit the pitch thrown by Byung-Hyun Kim, he raised his arms happily, realizing that he had tied the game.

Playoff and World Series games are petri dishes of emotion, with years of practice and planning and ambition and accomplishment and failure festering, and what emerges will be unexpected. So when Jose Bautista flips his bat demonstratively after clubbing a home run for the Blue Jays that will forever be remembered as the exclamation mark to one of the craziest innings in baseball history, as he did in Game 5 Wednesday in Toronto, reliever Sam Dyson and the Texas Rangers shouldn't take that personally; the gesture isn't really aimed at them. This was Bautista's competitiveness, his joy and his relief all mixed into one.

And the same latitude should be granted to Dyson before he's condemned as some kind of sore loser for his on-field and off-field complaints about Bautista's bat flip.