That’s the headline of this piece from Time. When did he do it? More than a decade ago, just after the Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa home-run-record chase that reenergized the game.
Rick Helling, a 27-year-old righthanded pitcher and the players’ representative for the Texas Rangers, stood up at the winter meeting of the Executive Board of the Major League Baseball Players Association and made an announcement. He told his fellow union leaders that steroid use by ballplayers had grown rampant and was corrupting the game.
“There is this problem with steroids,” Helling told them. “It’s happening. It’s real. And it’s so prevalent that guys who aren’t doing it are feeling pressure to do it because they’re falling behind. It’s not a level playing field. We’ve got to figure out a way to address it.
“He was the first guy,” David Cone says later in the piece, “who had the guts to stand up at a union meeting and say that in front of everybody and put pressure on it.”
Okay, no more sports for awhile.
(Hat tip)
