Today's Grampa Simpson Rant

It's not just the hippity-hop, and the wireless telephones, and the horseless carriage that get Frank's goat. It's those damn blabbering players (and the kids who won't stay off his lawn).

The Nationals manager is among the old-school baseball men annoyed by the modern-day intersquad camaraderie.

"There was no fraternizing when I played," the Hall of Famer said.

Well, there was some.

It simply was one-sided.

Such catchers as Roy Campanella and Yogi Berra were "chatterboxes back there, trying to get your attention away from what it's supposed to be on: hitting."

Robinson ignored them.

"And I didn't talk to first basemen," he said. "I might say hello, that's it."

Today Robinson sees a "completely different" attitude.

"It's not just [first base]," he said. "It's before the game, guys warming up, stopping out in center field to hold a 15- to 20-minute conversation. You see it at batting practice around the cage, you see it at every base, a timeout, a break in the action. Yak, yak, yak, yakking."

How soon til we see him campaigning for a return of the Reserve Clause to bring things back to the way they were in the olden days?