Baseball ethics, oxymoronic belly-laugh that they are, reared their grotesque head, square jaw and acne-scarred forearms again Sunday afternoon.

Mind you, I don’t think the Boston Red Sox-Tampa Bay Devil Rays lovefest had anything to do with ‘roid rage.

It was fueled by frighteningly normal testosterone levels. It was a demonstration of the do-unto-others-a-half-inning-after-they-do-it-unto-you credo that baseball lifers embrace and the rest of us blissfully don’t.

And it was utterly asinine, on both sides.

You won’t want to hear this, Red Sox fans, but Boston started it. In this game, anyhow.

Weary of perpetually overmatched Tampa Bay pitchers airmailing Mr. Spalding into the batter’s box all weekend long, the Sox dropped the hammer of justice in time-tested fashion. Somewhere beneath his now-bushy hair, Bronson Arroyo concocted the idea to plunk career nemesis Aubrey Huff in the bottom of Sunday’s sixth inning.

If you think that scrubbed the slate, you never had a sibling and never had to endure a road trip in the back seat of the family sedan with that person. Otherwise, you’d know that the last word is the only one that counts.

Next inning, Devil Rays meatball surgeon Lance Carter uncorked a purpose pitch close enough to shave Manny Ramirez’s chest hair. Ramirez, recognizing that he wasn’t facing Roger Clemens and wasn’t on national TV, applied every anger management technique in his repertoire and cold-cocked the next pitch into a bay of vacant bleacher seats.

Mired deep down the roster of the worst franchise in professional sports and not even talented enough to retaliate right, Carter promptly ran the ensuing count to one-and-two before attempting to tattoo David Ortiz through his helmet’s earhole with a 90 mph heater.

Ortiz, naturally, took this personally, triggering a highly obligatory bench-clearing situation which, aside from Trot Nixon and Dewon Brazelton’s encounter of the ego-driven kind, looked about as angry and threatening as the Duck Dance at your cousin Sophie’s wedding.

Now, assuming we weren’t dealing with first-graders fussing about who gets to use the “good” crayons, certainly we were done, right?

Hang on a second. More quickly than you can say, “I know you’re a big, fat stupid-head, but what am I,” Arroyo addressed his second pitch after the seventh-inning stretch for Chris Singleton’s thigh.

Had this been an actual brawl, the footage you just watched would have been followed by more pushing, eye-raking, unintelligible grunting and family-unfriendly lip reading. Baseball etiquette being predictable and preschoolish as it is, however, the teams proceeded to the pitcher’s mound with the gusto reserved for a poetry reading.

They felt dumb and looked dumber.

Boston could have let it lie, for now. Living well is the best revenge. Well, that and hitting 800-foot home runs like Ortiz and Jay Payton did later in the eighth inning of an 11-3 laugher.

Carter could have killed Ortiz. No, really. Tell me you didn’t think of Tony Conigliaro in that horrifying millisecond before Big Papi ducked.

And Arroyo could have been more creative, less conspicuous, and let Big Schill be the one to exact revenge the next time the world champs meet the poster child for contraction.

Baseball’s a great game. It’s also infected with some fatal flaws and mind-numbing unwritten rules.

Somebody please hit me again with a logical explanation why we should be in a hurry to inflict this game upon the next generation.

I promise not to hit back.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].