In the wake of yesterday’s hubbub which saw Pedro Martinez and Juan Marichal caught on tape taking part in a cockfight, PETA has issued its requisite demand for a public apology, while the Mets and Martinez released similar statements pointing to the legality and cultural significance of cockfighting in the Dominican Republic.

As you can imagine, the story doesn’t end there, as every major paper has their reaction to the story this morning.

Tim Marchman of The New York Sun pens one of the more interesting and thought-provoking responses this morning, succinctly examining society’s level of outrage to our various fallen heroes in the sports arena.

In the article Marchman opines that the Michael Vick scandal has, for better or worse, changed the way we view an incident such as this. Writes Marchman:

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.

However, in a bit of a twist, Marchman seems to reserve his true venom for Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa (a fervent animal lover, incidentally), who was arrested last March for drunk driving and was shown in a video released online completely incapacitated at the wheel, “incapable of even slurring his way through the alphabet.” Comparing the act to “firing a gun into a crowd of pedestrians,” Marchman wonders why the uproar over the LaRussa video was so muted in comparison to that over Pedro’s cockfight. He concludes:

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?