Despite all his warts, Boss should be in Hall of Fame

Try to envision what Major League Baseball would be like if George Steinbrenner never existed. Or, more simply, if he had found happiness running his father's shipping company in Cleveland and never aspired to do anything more than that.

It's an impossible task. You don't want to say that superstar players would still be selling insurance over the winter to make ends meet, or that clubs would still view TV revenue as ancillary, because that's an exaggeration and an underestimation of other contributors to the game.

But you can say - you have to say - that Steinbrenner's influence was so profound as to be virtually immeasurable. Which is why, as he sits on a ballot for the first time, he should be a no-brainer for the Hall of Fame.

True to his legacy, furthermore, the late Steinbrenner should serve as a leader. A trail blazer toward a new way of thinking about Hall candidates, as we enter a particularly dicey period on the morality front.

Steinbrenner is an easy call for Cooperstown induction because he blazed so many trails in the game. He realized the importance of free agency, and in accordance with that he understood that baseball constituted not just sport but also programming, as fans invested themselves in soap operas like George vs. Billy Martin vs. Reggie Jackson and later made the YES Network a gargantuan hit.

He constantly searched for competitive edges, whether they came in the boardroom or in the clubhouse, and he considerably elevated the notion of a sports team owner being a character in the aforementioned "programming." No other sports team owner besides The Boss has ever hosted an episode of "Saturday Night Live" in the show's 36 years of existence.

The bad? Yup, all of it legitimate. Two suspensions from the game, the first for his illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign and the second for paying gambler Howie Spira to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield. Throw in the terrible way he treated employees and other assorted adversaries, and this is not a man who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.

But we're not discussing humanity. We're discussing impact. When you think of the "Expansion Era," as the Hall is now calling the period from 1973 until the present, very few people can match Steinbrenner's impact. I can think of two: Current commissioner Bud Selig, and former union head Marvin Miller, who also is on this ballot. That's it.

You want a Hall of Fame filled with terrific human beings, you can build your own. You won't need much real estate, as the list of qualified applicants will be pretty small.

Which is why we should look at Steinbrenner's candidacy to examine players implicated in the Steroids Era. Just as you can't envision a Baseball Hall of Fame without Steinbrenner, can you see the point of having this institution if Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens won't be part of it? Or even Rafael Palmeiro or Manny Ramirez, for that matter.

Don't try to use this as a loophole to get Pete Rose in there, though. His crime is fundamentally different and enormously worse than the steroids guys.

If I had a vote on this particular ballot, I'd vote for Miller, Steinbrenner and Pat Gillick, the outstanding former general manager of the Blue Jays, Orioles, Mariners and Phillies. I wouldn't object to putting Tommy John there, either, among the players.

John, it should be noted, had a reputation for scuffing the baseball. People use any edge they can get, whether it's a player or an owner. Steinbrenner worked hard at getting such edges to put the game's jeweled franchise in a whole different stratosphere.

We're not arguing that you have to take the good with the bad when it comes to Steinbrenner. We're contending that the bad doesn't rank as particularly relevant.