Posted by Teddy Panos, Sun Staff

Mea culpa. I was wrr-wrr…. I was wrrrrr…I was wrr-wrr, wrr-wrr-wrr. I was wrong!

OK! There, I said it! I WAS WRONG!

The Red Sox should not have made a free agency bid for Alex Rodriguez in 2007, as yours truly suggested. In retrospect, Boston’s Boys of Summer made the right move avoiding the troubled talent, even if giving Mike Lowell a big-money, long-term deal might not necessarily turn out to be a good move. Bringing A-Rod to Beantown would have been a bigger disaster than having Chris Brown as your date to the Grammy’s.

We could have lived with the ego and the constant need for acceptance. We would have overlooked the pathetic production over the last three postseasons (.158 batting average), assuming the mere donning of red hose would return Rodriguez to the production levels before the Evil Empire’s epic 2004 collapse. (How many of you remember he batted .421 in that ’04 postseason?)

We would have shrugged off the manly strippers and the messy divorce, while cracking jokes about the material girl and how after a fresh start in Boston, we’d dress him up in our love and make him feel like a virgin. Heck, we might have even started a run on purple lipstick at the makeup counter.

In short, even though we might never have grown to adore him, we would have at least accepted A-Fraud. A-Roid is an entirely different matter.

I know we still applaud Rodney Harrison, but he’s different. He was popular and, as far as we know, only used HGH late in his career. Hey, who can’t relate to an old man fighting back from injury and desperately trying to hang on to the game he loves.

A-Rod was different. He was the guy to save baseball in the eyes of history, the player to erase the asterisks placed in the record books by Bonds, McGwire and Sosa. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t likable. The Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is loaded with jerks. As long as the jerk was a great player, we forgave pretty much any sin.

So when Jose Canseco started hinting about steroid use on the part of the best all-around player in the game, we looked the other way, not wanting to lump the tone physique of this graceful athlete with the muscle-head cartoon figures who came to represent the steroids era.

We long ago learned not to be surprised by any name showing up on a list of performance enhancing drug users, but we hoped, for just this one time, that Canseco was wrong. How ironic that one of the biggest sleazes to ever grace professional sports might have been the most honest figure of the era.

Alex Rodriguez did the right thing, quickly admitting guilt after being caught. Whether he fessed up to the full extent of it is another story, but at least Rodriguez went the Andy Pettitte contrition route instead of the Roger Clemens drive to destroy all in his path.

Still, the damage is done. A-Rod did indeed turn out to be A-Fraud, in the purest sense of the word. He harmed his name and his game. In the process, he forced the few of us who still defended him to admit being wrr, wrr-wrr-wrr…..

I made a mistake!