MLB

HE MUST THINK WE’RE ALL FOOLS

TAMPA – Let’s start by playing angel’s advocate, by giving Alex Rodriguez every benefit of every doubt. Let’s say he was being truthful when he said it took him a good week to remember exactly what it was that he was injecting into his system from 2001-03, even though most of us can go into great detail about a wonderful steak dinner we ate in 2002, or an especially cold beer that we drank in the summer of 2003.

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Let’s ignore the long pause he gave when I asked him why, if he thought he and his cousin were doing nothing wrong during the 36 or so times they shot each other up with what he called “boli” and what the rest of the pharmaceutical world knows as Primobolan, he didn’t ask anyone how to use it properly. Let’s assume he really was as naive as he wants us to believe.

Let’s, in fact, take Alex precisely at his word, that his dabbling with steroids was limited to the years 2001, 2002 and 2003, that he never touched the stuff before and he hasn’t come near it since. Rodriguez was born on July 27, 1975. That means that he would have started using just before his 26th birthday and stopped just after his 28th birthday.

That means Alex Rodriguez thinks you, me, and everyone else listening to his sad explanations are complete and utter fools. Because his entire presentation yesterday – really, since he started crying on Peter Gammons’ shoulder – has been summed up thusly: I was young, I was a kid, I was dumb, I was stupid.

He is half right. He was dumb. He was stupid. And he is banking on the gullible masses to be equally dumb and equally stupid, because by 2001 Rodriguez was not a kid anymore. He had already played parts of seven seasons in the major leagues. He had already earned over $12 million and was about to rake in $252 million more.

Young? Twenty-six is young for a lawyer. Twenty-six is young for a business executive. Twenty-six is even young to be a baseball player. But 26 isn’t young enough to serve as an excuse for making the mistakes of a 16-year-old.

Taylor Hooton was 16 years old in 2002, already more than 6-feet tall, when it was hinted to him that he should think about being bigger, and stronger. Hooton thought he found a remedy for that in a syringe. A year later he was dead, hanged by his own belt in his room in Plano, Texas, a victim, his parents say, of steroid-related depression.

Hooton was a kid. Rodriguez was not. Hooton’s father, Don, was ringside at the A-Rod circus yesterday, eager to promote the new partnership between Rodriguez and the Taylor Hooton Foundation, which seeks to educate kids on the dangers of steroid abuse. It is a mission Don Hooton takes seriously, almost religiously.

“All the stories I heard Alex tell today,” he said, “I have heard those stories a lot because they’re all true. My son, when he was finally confronted how much he would take, he put his fingers apart and said, ‘About that much.’ That’s how blind these kids

are going into this. No one is there to tell them anything.”

By 2001, Rodriguez could have gotten the Surgeon General himself on the phone to answer any question he may have had about the mystery wonder potion his cousin had smuggled in from the Dominican Republic. He chose not to. He says it was because he was “young” and “dumb” and “stupid.” I would add “arrogant” and “bulletproof” and “egomaniacal” to that list, for starters.

For now? Only Rodriguez himself knows for sure how much of the truth he’s really revealed, and so only he can truly sleep well at night, or stare himself square in the eye in the mirror in the morning. Maybe he really will be the kind of public face that will make a good cause like the Taylor Hooton Foundation an effective learning tool.

Because if it turns out Don Hooton was there yesterday as a prop, and not a prod, then we really were being played as brazenly and as openly as it felt like we were. Fool me twice, shame on me.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com