THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Blame the melee with M's on Angels breaking the code

No, it wasn’t fair.

But baseball fights almost never work out that way.

That physical throwdown last Sunday was started and finished by the Angels — but it was the Mariners who suffered, both on the spot (catcher Luis Torrens hurt his shoulder and will now hit the injured list), and in their attempt to keep alive their a long-shot gasp at a wild-card spot.

Three of Seattle’s most effective hitters (Jesse Winker, J.P. Crawford and Julio Rodriguez) have been given suspensions by Major League Baseball.

They also missed eight innings on Sunday, a 2-1 loss in which the Mariners had to send up everyone but the bat boy.

All three punished players have appealed, and perhaps a couple of the suspensions might be shortened — Julio’s may be wiped out completely, since he didn’t do anything except try to separate angry players.

The Mariners, though, can no longer afford any setbacks whatsoever, not if they harbor a ghost of a chance at the postseason.

Ty France, Mitch Haniger and Kyle Lewis are already on the injured list.

The Mariners are taking a standing eight-count.

SPEAKING of fighting terminology, I’ll admit I’m old-fashioned.

I grew up at a time when baseball had an unwritten code, and it worked to police the sport.

At a Giants-Dodgers game one night, the fearsome Don Drysdale threw a pitch high and tight to Willie Mays — and then he hit the next batter, Orlando Cepeda.

As it happened, Drysdale was leading off the next inning.

(Side note: One reason I hate the DH is because pitchers should have to get up and hit — facing the music, so to speak.)

The Giants had a hard-thrower, Bobby Bolin, pitching that night and everyone knew what was going to happen.

What HAD to happen.

Even Drysdale knew, and he actually turned his back to mound, giving Bolin a large target for the first pitch — which hit him right between the numbers.

Drysdale jogged to first, nobody yelled from either dugout, the umpires didn’t warn anyone, and the game proceeded from there.

Call it frontier justice, call it what you like — but everyone in the sport understood the code.

You just knew.

Hell, we learned it as kids.

I was a left-handed pitcher who didn’t throw particularly hard, but I scared hitters — perhaps because they thought I was a little crazy.

In high school, a kid hit a line drive back at me, a real bullet that came so quickly that I couldn’t completely get a glove on it, and the ball dislocated my thumb — which had to be yanked back in place.

The guy never got another hit off me, and I’m sure it’s because he was a little frightened that I was waiting for a spot to drill him in the head.

As long as he worried about that, I never had to do it.

In Babe Ruth League (13-15 years old) there was a big, red-headed catcher who wore me out. At one point, he hit three straight doubles over a two-game stretch.

So, I hit him in the butt.

And then I hit him a second time, right in the same spot.

The next at-bat, though, I struck him out on two change-ups that tailed away from him — mostly because he was expecting more “chin music,” I think.

IF ALL these tales, and my belief in the way baseball used to be played, sound a little ruthless …

So be it.

It was a better (and safer) game, because it was all in the hands of the players, and everyone knew the code.

Me, too.

I got pinged at the plate often enough, just as you’d expect. I’ve still got bruises.

That brings me back to Sunday, and my belief that the worst part of the brawl in Anaheim (besides the Mariners losing players) was that the Angels broke the code.

Ignored it entirely.

Prior to the Sunday scrum, Mike Trout complained to the media about a fastball near his head.

It was thrown, in the ninth inning of a 5-3 game, by an obviously wild Erik Swanson — in a situation where you’d never want to hit someone.

But Trout lit the match.

So, come Sunday, Angels interim manager Phil Nevin spit on the code by using an opener, a pitcher to do one job before his actual starter came into the game.

Andrew Wantz, the anonymous opener, threw a first-inning pitch BEHIND Rodriguez.

The Mariners didn’t like it, but they assumed the Angels were defending Trout, and that was that.

NOPE.

Wantz opened the second inning by hitting Winker on the hip.

“It was all premeditated," Winker said. “They had an opener begin the game to do that. And to me, it was just BS.

“The unfortunate thing is it all could have been stopped with a simple ejection and people just not talking.

“But there’s a man with a cast on [Anthony Rendon] and the manager [Phil Nevin] talking. That’s why this started. If they’re not talking, none of that happens. But they decided to run their mouth, and I didn’t like it.

“It’s that simple. There’s nothing left to say about that.”

Well, maybe one more comment, Jesse …

Twenty years ago, none of this would have happened.

The idea of using a pitcher just to throw at a couple of guys and then get him off the premises would have been ridiculous.

Oh, and somebody would have picked a spot later on, and gone hard after Nevin.

Guaranteed.

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Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press three times each week. He also writes Zags Tracker, a commentary on Gonzaga basketball which is published monthly during the offseason, and weekly beginning in October.

Steve suggests you take his opinions in the spirit of a Jimmy Buffett song: “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.”