Photo by David Roberts

Bryce Harper made a new enemy yesterday in Major League Baseball’s most voluble personality. After Harper came to the plate toting a pine tar-soaked bat, Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen—that endlessly quotable loudmouth—accused the 19-year-old of using too much of the sticky substance.

As Harper stepped to the plate in the fourth inning, Guillen started taunting the outfielder over his use of pine tar, which helps batters improve the friction with which their bats strike balls. But pine tar is not permitted to be applied above a bat’s label.

The flap began shortly after Harper’s first plate appearance in the bottom of the first inning, when he used a bat slathered in pine tar. Guillen thought Harper’s stick was over the limit of how much pine tar can be applied, and complained to the umpires. When Harper approached the plate again three innings later, things got testy, the Post reported:

In his next at-bat, Harper, who finished 0 for 4, used a new bat. But Guillen did not like something about how Harper walked to the plate. Guillen began yelling at Harper from the dugout, even grabbing a bat and shaking it in the direction of Harper and the Nationals’ dugout. Nationals Manager Davey Johnson started yelling back at him.

“I was just telling [Harper] how cute he was,” Guillen said. “Something happened there the inning before and I didn’t like it and I was talking to the umpire about it.”

But Harper, not a shrinking daisy himself, declined to counter Guillen’s tirade. In a way, that’s kind of a shame. In a profile in GQ before the season began—and in his minor-league appearances—Harper was a fiery, tempestuous brat. A showdown between Guillen and Harper could have resulted in an epic torrent of too-nasty-to-broadcast insults and outbursts.

Then again, one of the leading plot threads of the Nationals’ 2012 season has been the maturation of Harper, who rather than continuing the jerk-ass ways of his pre-MLB career, has been an upstanding ballplayer.

Guillen, however, continues to be as ornery and belligerent as ever. In his first season managing the Marlins, Guillen quickly earned the ire of Miami’s Cuban-American community with his tribute to Fidel Castro: “A lot of people wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years but that motherfucker is still here.”

And in a profile of the Marlins in The New Yorker, Guillen made no apologies for his acidic temperament and raised no expectations that he plans to calm down any time soon. “Fuck that, man,” Guillen told Ben McGrath. “I never be calm. I be Ozzie Guillen.”