Florida manager Tony Perez was kicked out of his first game of the season Wednesday night, after a prolonged argument with umpire Kerwin Danley.

	Marlins manager Tony Perez took exception to Kerwin Danley's decision.

Well, it wasn't so much with Danley as it was the entire umpiring crew, but we digress.

Either way, it cut a wide chunk out of the evening's sportscasts, a chunk that a Mets-Marlins game would not normally command.

This is a good thing, too, because managers have plainly lost the skill of being ejected the right way -- the way Billy Martin would have done it.

Then again, these are the new peaceable times for player/manager-umpire relations. Oh, players still get tossed, usually for bitching about ball-strike calls. But with only one exception -- Pittsburgh's Lloyd McClendon picking up first base and walking off the field with it after being tossed by Rick Reed on June 26 -- the managers don't carry on the way we want them to.

Proof? Well, McClendon hasn't been tossed since his virtuoso performance. I mean, what's the point in putting on some fine after-dinner theatre if you're only going to do it once?

Now, the umpires have had enough trouble over the past year and a half or so, watching a hunk of their membership hurled into early retirement and, more recent, barely convincing the major league baseball office not to start evaluating their work with a calculator.

So what do they need with managers jumping up and down like they'd just been given lava high colonics?

Well, they don't. But as a part of the guiding principle of our lives these days, what does that have to do with us?

So far, there have been 52 managerial ejections this season, which is down from the highs of the early '90s, when umpiring operated on what is known as the Froemming Principle -- namely, to do one's best work but with attitude.

The leaders in the clubhouse, and we mean that literally, are Colorado's Buddy Bell with six (which, for a team that has lost 22 of its past 26 games, seems downright Quaker), and Atlanta's Bobby Cox, with five.

On the other end, there are only four men who haven't been tossed yet, and three are division leaders -- Seattle's Lou Piniella, the Cubs' Don Baylor and Minnesota's Tom Kelly.

Kelly's never been a big arguer, but Baylor could get his hackles up pretty quickly when he was in Colorado, and Piniella was a temperamental genius. Now, all he has to do when an umpire squeezes his shoes is wait two innings because his players will find a way to make it better.

On the other end, Bell, you can understand. Cox, too, because he is usually good for somewhere between six and 10 a year. Plainly, he doesn't like umpires, and the vice is plainly versa.

Cox, though, has a problem with delivery. His legs aren't what they once were, so he can't really hit the field at the dead sprint any more. Plus, his face is one that contorts into expressions normally found on men passing a kidney stone, hardly the effervescent skull-pops-off-neck stuff of the earlier Piniella, or of Martin himself, the last of the great umpire baiters.

“

In other words, these aren't highlights at all. No dirt-kicking, hat-throwing, bat-hurling, f-word-in-all-the-parts-of-speech filibusters, the kind that makes baseball, well, baseball. ”

The highlights, other than McClendon's brilliant walk-off, were San Diego's Bruce Bochy getting tossed on successive days by Mike DiMuro, and Tampa Bay's Hal McRae going down with pitcher Mike Judd and catcher Mike DiFelice, again with DiMuro.

In other words, these aren't highlights at all. No dirt-kicking, hat-throwing, bat-hurling, f-word-in-all-the-parts-of-speech filibusters, the kind that makes baseball, well, baseball.

We can blame many factors for this -- quieter, more thoughtful managers like Oakland's Art Howe and Toronto's Buck Martinez; the change of Piniella from glowing red-ass to lottery winner; the glowering specter of Frank Robinson in the front office, making sure that the managers sort of behave themselves.

Well, they're all wrong, damn it. Bring back Billy Martin. Bring back Earl Weaver. Bring back the showmen of yesteryear, setting bat racks on fire to protest a hinky balk call. It's for the good of the game.

In the meantime, maybe we can convince Lloyd McClendon to run out onto the field in the next few weeks and dig up home plate with a jackhammer.

And don't lie and say you wouldn't watch, either.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com