Alex Rodriguez and steroids.

Lots of anger out there. Ball fans, journalists, regular Joes and Joannes. “How could you!” “He’s evil!” All the rest. It’s pretty amped up.

I absolutely am not going to give A-Rod a pass on this, but I’m not blowing a gasket over it, either.

For several reasons.

–I lost the capacity to be shocked or outraged by athletes and drugs … a while ago. Certainly no later than the summer of 2006, when apparent straight-shooter Floyd Landis (the guy was raised as a Mennonite in Pennsylvania, for goodness sakes) failed a drug test at the Tour de France. But I was going numb before that. In March of 2005, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro appeared before Congress, we absolutely knew something rotten was going on. But even then …

Drugging has been going on for most of my career. Going back at least to 1987 when Ben Johnson set a world sprint later (to be stripped from him a year later, at the Olympics) at the track and field world championships in Rome. And we suspected lots of East Bloc Olympic athletes even before that — remember the East German women’s swim team? My ability to get righteously indignant … is just burned out.

–Yes, I was one of those guys who wrote more than once about how grand it would be when the “clean” Alex Rodriguez caught and passed drug cheat Barry Bonds on the all-time home run list. But it doesn’t tick me off that he turns out not to be clean, either. I suppose I was fooled by Rodriguez not having scads of signs of ‘roid use. He didn’t get huge, for example. Remember how Bonds was busting out of jerseys? And how McGwire was so puffed up that it looked as if he might violently deflate if pricked by a pin? A-Rod was never quite like that. Nor was he as stiff and injury-prone as many of the more obvious ‘roiders were.

Now, which “clean” guy might get Bonds out of the record books? May never happen. Certainly not in my lifetime, assuming drugs actually disappear out of the game. Which means we ought to consider Henry Aaron, at 755, the true career homer champ.And Babe Ruth, at 714, No. 2.

–I now find myself racking my brain, trying to remember which guys “got huge” during the Steroid Era. So may guys were so big, I think we stopped noticing. We bought into the now-laughable concept of “nutrition and weights” so thoroughly … or maybe because there were just so many of these enormous, massively cut ballplayers (and the NFL is still overloaded with them, btw) that we all pretty much stopped thinking about it.

Here’s a way you can do your own testing. Look at a guy’s career and if he has a spike in power statistics at some odd age — often to disappear suddenly, often as a guy becomes oddly prone to pulled muscles and disappears out of the game … or if he plays at a high level just too long … he probably was juiced.

Actually, let’s make this broader: If a guy hit more than 40 homers in a season from 1995-2005, you have to look hard at him. If he was a pitcher and his fastball got faster, mid-career? You have to look hard at him. I know that’s going to drag some clean guys into the mud, but they can go complain to the cheats about that.

–I will name one guy I think was juiced, and then quit: Nomar Garciaparra. This isn’t fair to Nomar to pick him out, but the guy was huge around the turn of the century. He was hitting 30 homers a year, and it wasn’t just Fenway. And by the time he got to L.A., when testing was going on … he was stunningly average-sized guy with middling (heading toward limited) power. Another couple of names: Brady Anderson and Luis Gonzalez. Smallish guys who suddenly hit 50 homers. Gotta wonder about Andruw Jones, too. Well, gotta wonder about hundreds of guys.

–As a Hall of Fame voter, I’m going to have to mull what to do about stars of The Steroid Era, which ran for at least a decade from the mid 1990s. Any big numbers put up in that period now have to be viewed with complete suspicion. Aside, maybe (maybe) from numbers put up by the Just Plain Big Guys such as Jim Thome and Frank Thomas. A-Rod being outed seems to pretty much implicate everyone else who hit 40 homers in a year.

–A-Rod didn’t quite come clean, but admitting he did the drugs is a significant step. The story was going to fester, otherwise. Better to be out with it and let all the flak arc across the news cycle for a week or two. I was disappointed that A-Rod lied about it on tape … and that even during his confession to ESPN that he suggested he was “young and stupid” in 2001 — when he was 25 and had been in baseball six full seasons. I’ll give him stupid, but he wasn’t young. Not in baseball years. I also wish he would have gotten into specifics about how and where and when he got ‘roided up. He left that out.

–Jose Canseco was right. A guy most people mocked for all those “baseless allegations” from his books … has not been proved wrong even once when it comes to naming names of guys doing performance-enhancing drugs. Canseco was the guy who said, when the Mitchell Report came out, that he was surprised A-Rod wasn’t on there. Jose, you were right. Canseco has flaws, scads of them, but he wasn’t making up this stuff.

–It would be nice to know who the “greatest clean player” from the previous 15 years was, but we will never be able to decide. And this is unfortunate for baseball. Because it already was hard enough to compare players from, say, the Babe Ruth Era to the Henry Aaron Era. And that was when “PED” were just three random initials. Now, we have at least 10 years befouled by substances that gave great advantage to those who used them, and how can we tease out that mess? We can’t.

I remember an interview I did with Baseball Stat God Bill James, a couple of summers ago, and he was at first defense and then apologetic on my questions pertaining to drug use. Because it destroys his statistical models, and I believe he just has tremendous difficulty conceding to that. (And he didn’t.) Beginning in 1995, apparently most of the most productive players in the game got that way … not because of park effects, or a livelier baseball or a lowered pitchers mound … but because they used chemicals not readily available to anyone who played before, say, 1980.

–I absolutely would like to see the list of all 104 guys who failed drug tests in 2003, before testing was in place. A-Rod has been outed mostly because a lot of people don’t like him, and somebody apparently told Sports Illustrated about him. But that leaves 103 players who failed tests. (And lord knows how many others who were clever enough to beat the system), and if there is any way past the legal hurdles to get the whole list out there, let’s do it.

I am sick of steroids. I wish it would end. I just want to see games contested by athletes who are clean and sober, and apparently that is too much to ask.

I always hope that the latest confessions will be the last. Hasn’t happened yet, but I keep wishing.