Jose Canseco leaves me feeling conflicted.

He was/is a relentless, almost pathetic self-promoter. A guy out of control far too often. A tattle-tale and finger-pointer.

As a ballplayer, he was a muscle-bound freak. If he wasn’t a complete creation of steroids, he wasn’t far off. He could run a little, before he got brittle (remember the 40-40 season?). But something of a klutz. (How can a ball bounce off your head and into the stands for a home run?) Was he clean in 1986? If so, maybe he was a real player: he hit 33 home runs that season with 117 RBI. (See his career stats here.)

He fairly clearly was a key figure in the proliferation of steroids in the big leagues, though perhaps  not as big as he would have us believe.

A couple of the humor guys over at espn.com just did a roundup of Jose’s weirdnesses. It’s worth a look. It’s useful to have many/most of his nuttiness episodes in one place. I mean, sometimes you forget half the stuff he did because there’s so much of it.

I hate to give the guy much, if any credit, for … well, anything. But if we think it through, he is one of the most influential players of the modern era. For good (and mostly) ill.

If Canseco hadn’t written his book “Juiced” … would we still be watching guys hit 60 homers every year or two? Or former contact hitters going deep 50 times in a season? (Brady Anderson, come on down.)

Canseco was perhaps the No. 1 personality of the Oakland Athletics teams that were so prominent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Remember, the A’s were huge favorites over the Dodgers in the 1988 World Series, and in Game 1 Canseco hit a grand slam off Tim Belcher that may have killed someone had it landed in one of the pavilions. Instead, it went out on a line to center field. Remember that ball? He crushed it and it probably never was more than 20 feet in the air from home plate to exiting the yard.

So, here we have this guy who broke every rule but was a great show.

He never showed a bit of remorse, but does that make him very different from everyone else?

He wrote a book that cast a shadow over nearly a generation of baseball … yet the game might still be as chemically fake now as it was 10 years ago if he hadn’t decided he could make a buck by telling all.

I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know where to park him in my Manichaean universe. He’s mostly black hat, but would the Mitchell Report ever have been written if Jose doesn’t go public? Should we thank him for that?

I can’t decide. That’s the definition of conflicted.