Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, gets downright personal.

Baseball players’ faces aren’t covered up in helmets like those of football players.

You can see basketball players’ faces, too, but the NBA plays about half as many games as Major League Baseball, and the pace is too fast to really study the participants.

Baseball, with its individual matchups of pitcher vs. batter, can give us time to really evaluate its players.

But sometimes, things can get out of hand. We find it disturbing that recently the New York Post _ a bottom-feeder when it comes to being a responsible newspaper _ printed photos by someone who followed Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez on a trip to Toronto.

Rodriguez, who is married, was in the company of a young woman who was not his wife. This was front-page news in the tabloid rag for days.

Rodriguez makes a lot of money _ an awful lot of money, but he committed no crime and he’s not a publicity-seeking starlet like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. The tawdry media treatment he received was _ to say the least _ inappropriate.

On a far-more entertaining note, a couple of baseball managers recently provided us with some laugh-out-loud activity that showed that baseball is meant to be fun.

The Chicago Cubs’ fiery Lou Piniella, a former Yankee, went ballistic during a dirt-kicking tirade against an umpire and got himself suspended for four games.

But not even Piniella could match the antics of minor league manager Phillip Wellman of the Mississippi Braves.

Already seen thousands and thousands of times on television and YouTube, Wellman’s tantrum on Friday was an instant classic.

Upset with an umpire’s call, Wellman argued enough to get thrown out of the game. He then got up close to the ump and gestured on either side of the man’s face. Then Wellman covered up home plate with dirt, but he was just getting started.

He walked to third base, pulled it out of its moorings and tossed it into center field. Then he dropped down and crawled on his belly toward the pitcher’s mound where he picked up the rosin bag. Pretending it was a hand grenade, he pulled an imaginary pin with his teeth and hurled the "grenade" in the direction of the plate umpire.

For an encore, he walked to second base, pulled that out, too, picked up third base from the outfield and strutted to the clubhouse entrance in the outfield where he used both hands to blow a kiss to everyone in the stadium.

The Braves suspended him for three games.

Nothing got hurt, except perhaps Wellman’s wallet from being fined, and the cameras captured a well-choreographed, entertaining tantrum for the ages.

Athletes stir emotions in fans that sometimes get out of hand. Hank Aaron received death threats when he was closing in on Babe Ruth’s career home run record. Bill Buckner’s life was made miserable because Boston fans wouldn’t forgive him for an error in the 1986 World Series.

We don’t recommend behavior like Piniella’s and Wellman’s. But they do help us remember that baseball is, after all, a game.