Everyone knows that Pedro Martinez is a fighter. He once drilled the first batter he saw in a game, got into a fistfight with him, and set down the next 24 men in order, ending up with a one-hitter. In a playoff game five years ago, his inside pitching set in motion a fight that ended with the unfortunate sight of him face-planting the septuagenarian Yankees coach, Don Zimmer.

This is, though, the same man who maintained a stylish jheri curl for years, kept a personal dwarf, and once spoke to tulips in his garden in front of a Times reporter. It is a sad day when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals can, as they did yesterday, send him a letter comparing him to the reviled quarterback and dogfighter, Michael Vick. (“Pedro,” the group said in a press release, “should stick to fighting Yankees bench coaches — not animals.”)

PETA’s ire was roused by a video, briefly posted online and since taken down, that shows Martinez and his idol, Hall of Fame pitcher Juan Marichal (to whom he once gave one of his Cy Young award plaques) participating in a cockfight in the Dominican Republic. Stills posted at one Web site show Martinez and Marichal presenting roosters in a pit before seedy spectators and then grinning while watching one kill the other. This is embarrassing for Martinez and the Mets. Cockfighting is banned in all 50 states — though it isn’t hard to find a ring in Prospect Heights, and Louisiana’s ban doesn’t take effect until August. As PETA noted in their letter to Martinez, these animals, which are drugged and tortured before being forced to fight to the death in “notorious hotbeds of gambling and illegal drugs,” can “feel pain and fear and suffer,” just like Vick’s dogs (or, for that matter, like the chickens whose meat makes the sandwiches Mets fans scarf down at Shea Stadium).

From Martinez’s perspective, he has little more real reason to be ashamed than he would if he’d been spotted at a rodeo. Unlike Vick, he has broken no law, written or unwritten. Cockfighting is not only quite legal in the Dominican Republic; it is considered a noble sport. He told ESPN Radio, “I understand that people are upset, but that is part of our Dominican culture.”

While this is a reasonable and honest thing to say, these fights, as the video shows, are vicious and cruel, unworthy of someone of whom you’d rather think well. Being more respectable than Vick is not something of which to be very proud, and at least some Mets fans will be disgusted. Mrs. Marchman, who had intended to buy a Martinez shirt to replace my 3-year-old’s too-small Jose Reyes shirt, is now going to buy a Keith Hernandez shirt. She’s likely not alone.

More interesting than Martinez’s response, though, is that he made it at all. One presumes his response, and a Mets statement disavowing animal cruelty, were made because of the outrage over what Vick did to his poor dogs. No one wants even for a moment to be associated with that, and with headlines such as “Report: MLB Player Seen at Cockfight” and “Video Posted of Martinez at Cockfight” hitting the wire services, they knew there would be an uproar.

There were, though, no wire service headlines, and there was no discernible uproar, when a video of the St. Louis Cardinals manager, Tony LaRussa, being arrested last March for driving under the influence was released online. It’s a disgraceful and embarrassing sight: LaRussa was not only drunk, but asleep behind the wheel of his massive car, completely incapable of even slurring his way through the alphabet. There seems to be little difference between driving in that condition and shoving random passersby onto train tracks or firing a gun into a crowd of pedestrians.

Maybe there was no outrage over that video because the arrest happened so long ago. But then, there was no outrage when LaRussa first came out onto a baseball field after that arrest. He got a standing ovation. Later in the year, one of his pitchers, Josh Hancock, died in a drunk driving accident.

The outrage over what Vick did is, on balance, probably a good thing, and so long as it’s in proportionally lesser measure, so is any outrage directed at Martinez. Between the indignation over animal cruelty, dirty steroid needles, and gun violence in sports, though, there seems to be a bit less left over than there ought to be for the less sensational and vastly worse problems of drunk driving and spousal abuse. Martinez may not quite have apologized for what he did, but neither did LaRussa last March. Which is more worth being really angry about?

tmarchman@nysun.com