Sports of The Times: Induct Steinbrenner? Let’s Think About This

George Steinbrenner died on July 13. It’s now November, and he is on a short list for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

We were just getting used to the gross plaque honoring the Sun King of the Bronx. In the heady rush of deserved respect and understandable nostalgia, we need to slow down and evaluate the Boss.

First we need to remember that Steinbrenner narrowly escaped going to prison after pleading guilty to illegal campaign contributions and that he could have been barred from baseball forever after consorting with a lowlife gambler to discredit Dave Winfield, one of his own players.

Steinbrenner has been named to the eligible list of distinguished baseball people from the expansion era, 1973 on. He will be judged by a solid group of 16 executives, writers and former players.

Yes, character is one criterion for the Hall, particularly for people in uniform. Joe Jackson is barred for being involved in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, and it is too late for him. Pete Rose is barred for gambling and then lying about it while he was managing. I personally think Rose the player belongs in the Hall, but I totally understand why he is barred. He made it hard on himself, the knucklehead, and may never get into the Hall in his lifetime. Then again, the Boss made it hard on himself, too.

Steinbrenner was a builder, a successful club owner, but does he deserve to be in on sheer baseball merit? There is one argument that Steinbrenner was better than moral, better than smart. He was lucky. He turned a modest personal investment, said to be $168,000, into a $10 million package that, enriched by unforeseen cable television revenue, became the most lucrative franchise in baseball, worth $1.6 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Then Steinbrenner got lucky all over again while barred by Commissioner Fay Vincent for conspiring with the gambler — the best thing that ever happened to him and his beloved Yankees.

While Steinbrenner was verifiably out of power, his front office, most notably General Manager Gene Michael, protected the best young players in the farm system. You might have heard of them: Jeter, Posada, Williams, Rivera, Pettitte. For once, the Yankees did not trade away their future for expensive old stars. George came back and presided over one of the great eras of Yankees baseball.

So, maybe the voters should instead pick Joe Torre and Michael and even poor, addled Billy Martin, who is actually on this makeup ballot.

But Steinbrenner got most of the credit and most of the profit from the golden era that began during his absence. What a guy. He bent the rules and used his money to get his way, but there are already a few owners like that in the Hall. Besides, if high character were to become a standard, who would run the banks and the stock market and the corporations?

Am I getting soft on the Boss? With the flick of a finger I can find columns I wrote in the 1980s when he was younger and so was I, when I called him the Man From Tampa and told him to get out of town, that he dishonored New York by his bullying of employees, his diatribes against baseball officials, his putdowns of players, his apologies for losses, his blustering about legal and moral issues. I often blamed three signature men of the ’70s — Murdoch, Trump and Steinbrenner, a veritable three-person Page Six of crudeness — for the lowering of civil discourse in New York.

But that was then. We have all since accepted that Steinbrenner was spontaneously generous to good causes, to the needy. We also watched him grow old, start to fade from sight, much like our grandparents, our parents and, good grief, maybe even people in our own generation. He was, after all, human. In his later years, a lot of us came to miss that force of nature.

Ultimately, to my chagrin, I cannot work up any major moral or legal long-term argument for keeping Steinbrenner out of the Hall. He paid his penalties, and he came back.

I think he belongs in the Hall — eventually.

Let’s look at it this way. The oversight panel exists to right wrongs, and there already is one major injustice in the Hall of Fame: Marvin Miller, who is also on the ballot before the veterans committee this year, is not a member.

As head of the players union, Miller outsmarted the owners, including Steinbrenner, to bring about free agency in the ’70s. Cable riches and free agency have probably widened the gap between the richest and poorest teams, but that gap has always existed.

Everybody makes more money because of Marvin Miller. But voters have tended to ignore Miller because baseball people have a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. That is, they identify with their captors and become fearful of truly smart people with vision, like Marvin Miller. In recent years, even some baseball people seem to have come to understand that a truly great innovator and leader has been shortchanged.

At least one member of the panel feels that way. Jim Palmer, the Hall of Fame pitcher, said in an e-mail: “My vote has been and will always be for Marvin. He gave the modern day player a voice, completely changed the landscape.” He spoke positively about Steinbrenner, but added, “There are enough marks against him to warrant a later entrance.”

Marvin Miller is 93. He deserves to be present at his induction into the Hall of Fame. Then, when the first wave of emotion has passed and we are all thinking a bit more clearly, let’s get back to the discussion about George Steinbrenner.

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