It has always bothered me to no end hearing people refer to Ivan Rodriguez as “Pudge,” as though the juicing and backpedaling somehow put him in the company of possibly the surliest, toughest backstop of all-time. It’s as though playing the same position as one of the all-time greats – one whose career Rodriguez actually overlapped for two seasons – warranted a cheapening of someone else’s hard-fought term of endearment.

Not that Rodriguez hasn’t assembled a résumé for the ages, but the problems in drawing parallels between he and Fisk run much deeper than that.

Imagine a road team’s announcer calling Adam Dunn “Big Hurt,” or baseball cards regaling the accomplishments of Carl “Junior” Crawford. It just doesn’t work, because those names, those identities, are already taken by grossly different players, and there we start to approach the real reason Ivan Rodriguez is not – and never will be – Carlton Fisk.

Fisk’s highlight reel reads like a playbook on how to play bare-knuckled baseball. The home run at the foul pole. Schooling Neon Deion, a man 20 years his junior. Tagging out two at home on the same play. The last great gunslinging rivalry. Shredding his knees to stay in the game. Putting up with disastrous decisions by a temp worker general manager and coming out stronger for it, even when the team he loved turned its back on him.

Those are what either camp of Sox fan – Red, White – thinks of when you say “Pudge.” No one thinks of a slick-fielding kid hitting a lot of home runs for a franchise only good for hitting home runs. No one thinks of a bat-for-hire coincidentally losing a considerable amount of weight just as steroid testing gets serious. No one thinks of a name being named in a book that’s proved surprisingly, almost horrifyingly accurate.

So when they talk about the new high-water mark for games played as a catcher, they will all, of course, get it wrong. Pudge didn’t break that record yesterday; Ivan Rodriguez did.