Two weeks ago, “The Big Cat,” Ernie Ladd, died. While the name won’t mean anything to some of you, others will remember that he was a legendary star in both football and professional wrestling for many years, an AFL Hall of Famer who played with the original Fearsome Foursome and then roamed America during the 1970s, throttling foes in the squared circle with his famed taped thumb. At 6-feet-9-inches, 315 pounds, he was bigger than anyone in either sport in his day. He was also an early user of steroids. When he played for the San Diego Chargers in the early 1960s, his strength coach was Alvin Roy, a weightlifter who would set bowls of Dianabol on the cafeteria tables and insist that the players never neglect to eat their pills.

The story illustrates a basic truth: Steroid use in football precedes the formation of the modern National Football League, and the rise in popularity of the NFL was fueled by drugs. Chargers from Ladd’s day were on steroids, and they are today. Shawn Merriman, a Chargers linebacker, made the Pro Bowl in a year in which he was suspended for steroid use. No one cared.

Football is just one of the many forms of entertainment in which drug use is both routine and widely accepted by the public. This month, for instance, Sylvester Stallone was charged in Australia with criminal possession of human growth hormone, a surprise to no one who’s seen the ridiculously grotesque images on offer in “Rocky Balboa.” If you search for Sylvester Stallone and hGH in Google’s news index, you get 38 hits. Search for Gary Matthews Jr. and hGH and you get 1,379. Matthews is a scrub outfielder who hasn’t been accused of doing anything illegal, but rather of having had hGH for which he had a prescription shipped to a friend’s house at a time when baseball didn’t forbid use of the hormone. Stallone is one of the most famous actors of all time and has been charged with a crime.

As a baseball partisan who believes that one pitch tossed in a spring training game is more worthwhile than every movie Sylvester Stallone has ever made and all the football games ever played put together, I’m not outraged by this sort of thing. “He did it, too” is an excuse for toddlers. I do, though, find it curious. Why is it that drug use in baseball occasions mass outrage, while 350-pound men running 4.4 second 40s and the biologically unlikely abdominal muscles on display in a typical Hollywood movie (“300,” say) elicit nothing at all?

At root, the reason is probably that every male fan thinks on some level he’s a ballplayer. Few watch a strong safety hauling down a running back and think, “I could do that,” but it’s easy to watch a ballgame and think that if you’d tossed the pill around in your backyard a bit more often when you were younger, you could take the mound at Shea Stadium. I’m a small guy — 5-feet-10-inches, 160 pounds — and Pedro Martinez, Roy Oswalt, Mariano Rivera, and Tim Hudson, to name a few, aren’t much bigger than I am. David Wells is a few months away from turning 44 and has struggled with gout and diabetes, and he’s still a damn good pitcher. Young, old, skinny, fat, fast, slow — anyone, it seems, can play baseball. This isn’t, of course, true. Baseball is the most difficult of the major team sports. It seems true, though, and a lot of baseball’s appeal is tied up in this perception.

Steroids show this preposterous but cherished myth that ballplayers are more similar to normal people than modern athletes to be an illusion, and this makes people feel naive, as if they ‘ve been conned. This is why people get angry about juiced ballplayers in a way they don’t get angry about the use of drugs by actors to whom they don’t relate at all.

All of this is especially true when comparing baseball to football and basketball for another reason — race. The percentage of black players in the majors today is around 9%. In the NFL, the number is around 65%; in the NBA, 80%. That matters. Go into any sports bar or listen to any call-in talk show, and you’ll hear people talking incessantly, passionately, about racial grievance. They often do so in code (“I can’t stand it, these players with the hipping and the hopping and the rap music and the gangs”), but you can’t mistake the visceral hatred of end zone celebrations, baggy shorts, and so on for anything but a fear of or fascination with young, aggressive black men.

Football and basketball are played mostly by young black athletes with whom the middle-age white men who account for most of the audience for team sports have nothing in common, and this has a lot to do with why no one cares about drug use in those sports. If the phrase isn’t by now completely discredited, you might call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. Doubly alienated from the athletes, fans of the sports, many of whom view the players as no different than gang members, aren’t outraged by drug use because they don’t expect anything better.

Baseball’s different. People don’t find the players threatening. One may as well say it — the sport is culturally white and middle class in a way football and basketball aren’t. Partly for this reason, baseball players are more widely expected to conform to ethical norms by its fans.

How much drug use has to do with ethical norms of any sort is a different question, but overall the outrage over steroids in baseball is a good thing, and shows, in its odd way, how esteemed baseball is. If baseball’s being singled out, it’s because people view it as something more than a gladiatorial spectacle. This might not make much sense on several levels, but sports don’t make much sense at all. And far better for baseball to be unfairly singled out than to be treated like Ernie Ladd’s second line of work, pro wrestling. That’s the one in which people in their 30s and 40s die of enlarged hearts brought on by heavy steroid abuse all the time, and no one cares at all.

tmarchman@nysun.com