Steroids shocks fading

The stories, the great majority of them anyway, say that Big Papi has disgraced himself and ruined his legacy, that the Red Sox’ storybook championship in 2004 is now tainted to some degree or another. Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times called the latest steroid news, the outing of David Ortiz as a performance enhancer, a “shameful revelation.”

Yet Ortiz, on the very day his name was reported to be on the list of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, received a curtain call after hitting a three-run homer at Fenway.

Since returning from his 50-game suspension for testing positive this year, Manny Ramirez has been celebrated as a returning hero and cheered at every turn.

The writers who predicted Alex Rodriguez would be jeered at every stop on the road after he was reported to be on the 2003 list have been way off base. The Yankees, whose roster was loaded with players reported to have used performance-enhancing drugs, are no worse for wear; they sit atop the AL East, and nobody even remembers that Andy Pettitte was at the center of his own steroid mess not so long ago.

Bottom line is, people don’t much seem to care.

Oh, reporters and editors and producers do. And card-carrying AARP members, which is at least how old you have to be to have grown up treating baseball in general and home run numbers specifically with biblical reverence.

Oh sure, there are men in their 40s such as Yankees Manager Joe Girardi, who said upon learning that Ortiz and Ramirez were on that 2003 list, “This era saddens me.”

But anecdotally, many more people, perhaps exponentially, seem to be of the same opinion as Ramirez, who said within earshot of an ESPN reporter that this “isn’t that big a deal.”

Can it be that big a deal if so many people were on something?

Early in this decade, I was loath to give any credence to Jose Canseco’s claim that 80 percent of players were juicing. Now it’s impossible not to at least pay attention to Canseco when he says: “If you were in the game the last 20 years, there’s a 95 percent chance you were knowingly using something. I said 80 percent back then because that was the number of players that I knew were on. But that number was greater.”

Except for the most naive, we’ve gone from being outraged over these revelations to resigned. Ramirez, arrogant as he sounded, was probably right on the mark when he told reporters: “This isn’t going to have any impact on either of us. We’re going to both keep hitting.”

Sure enough, nobody has had a record or personal statistics taken away. Contracts keep escalating. But one thing could definitely be impacted: Hall of Fame voting.

It’ll probably come as a shock to somebody paying as little attention to anything as Ramirez, but baseball writers vote on the Hall of Fame.

The next generation of voters, whatever their affiliation, probably won’t hold baseball in such regard that they’ll keep all the juicers out of Cooperstown. Canseco, whose batting average in the steroid game is too high to ignore any more, says the writers have already voted in one steroid user, which means there’s at least one more grand revelation coming.

Of course, the players association is to blame for the public nature of these latest discussions after it failed to destroy the list of names, which is titillating if nothing else. That’s about the extent of it, the Oooooooh! factor upon hearing another name.

The Yankees’ Mark Teixeira is one of those who says the drip, drip, drip of one name after another is worse than just releasing the entire list of 104 names. “Just get it all out,” is the way Teixeira put it to reporters last week.

There are precious few A-listers who would surprise me at this point if their names popped up. Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken Jr., Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, Curt Schilling, Albert Pujols. Even if one or more of those names appeared, it doesn’t mean fans or even sponsors would care beyond the moment.

Perhaps it mattered more with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens because each was so reviled. Bonds and Clemens are two of the most disliked team-sport athletes over the last 20-plus seasons. Everybody else, from Jason Giambi to A-Rod, seems to keep playing, sometimes after what seems to be the bare minimum when it comes to apologies.

In any case the men on the list, some of them the best players in baseball, apparently will keep playing. They’ll continue to be cheered when they hit home runs, when they win games, when the play in the postseason on baseball’s biggest stage.

They’ll keep cashing checks and doing interviews and being given a hero’s welcome when they cross home plate or generate civic pride. It doesn’t seem to be a very big deal to most people following baseball, least of all the paying customers.

XMichael Wilbon is a columnist for The Washington Post and host of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption.”