Mike Celizic

The initial news was delightful: Mark Cuban wanted to buy the Dodgers. The follow-up news was depressing: a baseball team isn’t a possession he has to have.

With George Steinbrenner in muted seclusion, baseball has run out of charismatic owners. Look where you may, there’s not a lovable lunatic to be found in an owner’s box anywhere in the game.

Since the beginning of time, larger-than-life owners have been as much a part of baseball as hot dogs and peanuts. From Harry Wright to Col. Jake Ruppert to Connie Mack to Bill Veeck to Charlie Finley to Steinbrenner, the game’s narrative has been as much about the owners as it has been about the players.

No more. As the price of doing business has increased, so has the degree of dullness. Oh, there are plenty of bad owners, but not one who goes out of his way to create headlines. Most of them are as anonymous as bus drivers.

That’s why it was so exciting to hear that Cuban might be back in the hunt for a big-name team after losing out in a bid for the Chicago Cubs. I had thought that he’d be the perfect man to finally drag the Cubs out of their morass of mediocrity — and to inject some front-office drama back into the game. Alas, it didn’t work out that way.

So when his name popped up as a possible bidder for the Dodgers, whose ownership has become a fiercely contested prize in the nasty divorce of owners Frank McCourt and his soon-to-be ex-wife Jamie. The McCourts have showed no interest in selling, but with the property settlement phase of their split yet to come, that could change.

And again, who better to take over than Cuban? OK, maybe someone from Hollywood like Mel Gibson. He’s enough of a lunatic, but he’s more into breeding a baseball team than owning one. And nobody else seems that interested, either.

So it’s back to Cuban, the last man in America who still knows how to own a sports team with panache. If only he’d show a little more interest.

Instead, he addressed the possibility of branching out into baseball by saying, “It’s just one more business opportunity. If it’s the right deal, I’m going to do it. And if not, I’m not.”

In baseball, there’s no such thing as the right deal, at least not with a team that’s worth owning. The price will be too high, the profits too low, the headaches unending.

But if you’re born to own sports teams, none of that matters. It’s in your blood. You have to do it.

I’m hoping that’s how it’s going to be with Cuban, because baseball needs an owner we can hang a headline on, and there just aren’t any prospects out there.

Cuban would immediately be the game’s most interesting owner. He wouldn’t be perfect, not like Steinbrenner was, but to criticize him for that would be like criticizing a grizzly bear for not being more like a T-Rex.

When Steinbrenner was at the peak of his powers 20-30 years ago, no one could match him. He was a bombastic, blustering, browbeating brute, and that was when he was in a good mood.

You’d think someone like that would be as popular as herpes, and that was pretty much the case with people who found themselves in his line of ire. But those were always people who worked for him. With the public, he played the gruff uncle with the heart of gold.

Fans almost universally adored Steinbrenner because he was nice to them and treated underperforming rich guys the way fans think they should be treated — like cockroaches. If the vintage Steinbrenner were around today, in fact, he’d be the guy everybody would want to see riding herd on Wall Street.

No one this side of Vlad the Impaler is going to give us that kind of entertainment, and Vlad is unavailable, having been terminally dead for more than 500 years.

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Cuban is not Vlad, nor is he Steinbrenner. He’s got the bluster, charisma, boundless enthusiasm, burning desire to win and the bankroll, but he lacks the mean streak, at least when it comes to is players. He can out-Steinbrenner The Boss, but only when the object of his displeasure is a referee or a league executive.

Players and coaches are a different matter. When he gets in a fight with a coach, as he did with Don Nelson, he hands it over to his lawyers. And if he has ever been furious at a player, he keeps it private. Instead of beating the players up, even when they fail to meet expectations, he buys them a new luxury airplane or installs bigger flat-screen televisions in their lounge.

Still, he’d be a breath of fresh air. And if he didn’t browbeat the hired help, he’d at least tee off on the umpires and league executives until commissioner Bud Selig was praying for the good old days when the only thing he had to worry about was the next revelation about which superstar was doing steroids.

So, come on, Mark. Quit worrying about making a good investment. Throw a pile of money at the McCourts, and if they won’t bite, make the pile bigger. Baseball needs you.

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