Judging from the comments below, I’d say so. You guys are touchy!

Let me give Chris, who asks why I continue to harp on David Ortiz’s steroid use, a serious answer.

Chris says, “Your steroid fixation with Ortiz is getting old. Why don’t you focus on guys who really used them—Afraud, Clemens, Pettite [sic]…”

Afraud? I’d go with Aroid, but that’s just me.

In any case, the answer is this.

Pettite says he used steroids once to come back from an injury, and nobody really seems to argue that; Clemens is a former Red Sox, so you know where that trouble started (and besides, he’s out of baseball); and A-Rod, well, I still think there’s more to that story. How A-Rod became the most hated man in baseball, I’m still not sure I understand.

But what bothers me, Chris, is the double standard here. Sox fans go ballistic about A-Rod, what a terrible guy he is and all that. Hell, if you polled Sox fans, I’ll bet at least 50 percent would approve of Ryan Dempster deliberately throwing at Rodriguez multiple times. Just because, you know, he used steroids.

But out of all the players we’ve mentioned here, the only one who’s actually failed a drug test is David Ortiz. And Ortiz’s ridiculous numbers, both in the mid 2000s, the height of the steroid era, and more recently certainly suggest that he was/is a ‘roid user. From 2004-2006 Ortiz drove in 424 RBIs and hit 142 home runs, or about 47 a season. There’s no way those are not artificially inflated numbers.

And, Chris, the three other players you mention are out of baseball, at least for now. Ortiz is still playing. And, possibly, still using. Let’s be honest, last year was weird.

Yet Sox fans give Ortiz a pass. They don’t want to know. And the main reason they don’t want to admit it is because they’d have to admit that their World Series victories in 2004 and, very likely, 2007 are completely tainted.

Hey, I don’t blame you. That’s a tough thing to come to terms with, given how important those championships were to the Sox. And Ortiz is an immensely likable guy who’d probably be a very good hitter even without steroids. Just not the monster hitter that he was.

Alex Rodriguez, however, is not a likable guy. By almost all accounts, he’s an insufferable jerk. (I say “almost” because I know someone who knows him and swears A-Rod is just misunderstood.)

So Ortiz gets a pass, while A-Rod gets ostracized and thrown at—when they both did the same thing.

That’s not right. That’s high school mentality. We let the cool guy off the hook and pick on the unpopular one. Because we can’t admit Ortiz’s transgressions, we’re just going to pile on A-Rod that much more. To prove to ourselves that, no, really, we take this steroid stuff seriously. There’s no place for it in baseball!

Except when it was the foundation of the Red Sox’s first World Series victory in a century or so.

So as long as Sox fans are in denial about what really happened in 2004 and afterward—or as long as they keep vilifying A-Rod while canonizing Ortiz—I’ll keep harping on David Ortiz’s steroid use.