If I could go back to the height of steroids abuse in baseball … and maybe 2002, 2003 would be it … I am convinced I could pick out the users, most of them, just by looking at them.

I now believe I can spot the reckless or unsophisticated user — and that was most of them, back then, pre-drug testing.

Even now, I can remember being in a locker room and thinking, “Man, that guy is huge.”

But the thought would stop right about there … when now we know there was a reason for that guy being huge beyond lots of protein and free weights.

There was a look to the steroid guys. The most obvious was/is their enormous upper bodies. And how “cut” they looked. “Six-pack abs” was the calling card of these guys. Well, that and back acne (one prominent Dodger slugger had a bad case of it, a decade ago) …

And then this other rather difficult concept to explain. A sense that the puffed up guys … might explode at any second.

Not talking about fits of ‘roid rage here. Though I could be.

Talking more about a feeling that the huge guys’ bodies barely fit inside their skin. Their skins seemed dangerously stretched to cover all that muscle. They gave the impression that their skin might just tear one day, from being stretched too far. Or that pricking them with a pin might cause them to deflate like a blowup doll. (A look created by the enormous amounts of water they were carrying, because of the ‘roids.)

Today, this minute, I am convinced I could identify the ‘roided up guys from the period encompassing the middle 1990s to the middle 2000s. They just had a look. Pretty much the same from guy to guy. Not just big, but unnaturally big and (among the anglos) a sort of scary pinkish-red look to them.

Also, you didn’t need to be near the showers to spot the ‘roided up guys. On the field, they were the ones who looked as if they were poured into their uniforms … or that their uniforms were painted on. They were bursting out of their jerseys. They tended to be the ones who talked — a lot — about their really ambitious offseason training regiment. And there almost always were pictures, if you went back a few years, when they were stunningly smaller than the slugger standing in front of you at the moment.

(Check Barry Bonds, pre-1998 and compare him to the guy from 2000, 2001, 2002, etc.)

I am not convinced steroid abuse has left sports. The NFL does drug-testing, but too many of their guys are still just way too buff to be only about, again, protein and free weights.

I’ve written this about baseball, but it applies to football, too … I actually am pleased to see fat guys in the sport. Because fat guys disappeared during the steroid era, pushed out of jobs by guys who weighed as much as they did — thanks to chemicals. And this is hard for you young people to believe, but there was a time when “fat” was associated with strength. Like a Babe Ruth. Or a circus strongman. Anyone who could carry around that much weight had to be strong. They just did. And to see D-linemen with big bellies … well, it’s not healthy, but at least it’s natural and not some freakish science experiment.

I believe track and field still has issues with drug abuse, both male and female. I’ve mentioned the NFL. And a sport that is not on the radar in this country but appears, to me, to be rife with steroid abusers is something called “Rugby League.” Where that look I remember from a decade ago is au courant.

Today’s A-Rod mea culpa brings me back to this topic, and reminds me that — years too late — I believe I have a pretty good idea of who ought to be drug-tested. Just by looking.