The admission on Monday by baseball great Mark McGwire that he used steroids during his career didn't shock me or my colleagues in the U.S. Capitol Press Gallery - almost five years earlier, we came to the same conclusion.
Yesterday, things changed. McGwire - who is coming back into baseball as the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals - came clean and admitted that he used steroids.
"I'm sure people will wonder if I could have hit all those home runs had I never taken steroids," McGwire said in a statement. "But no matter what, I shouldn't have done it and for that I'm truly sorry."
But looking back on his appearance at a Congressional hearing on the use of performance enhancing drugs, it's easy to see that hearing was a game changer for baseball.
Under oath in March of 2005 in a jammed House hearing room, McGwire refused to repeat his previous denials that he had used steroids, instead saying things like "I'm not here to talk about the past," and "I'm here to be positive about this subject."
McGwire wasn't the only big hitter who seemed to swing and miss that day.
Sammy Sosa, who went toe-to-toe with McGwire in a home run battle in 1998 used an interesting opening statement to deny that he used "illegal performance enhancing drugs."
It wasn't exactly a convincing argument.
Rafael Palmiero, who starred with the Texas Rangers and Baltimre Orioles, was defiant about allegations of steroids use, flatly telling lawmakers, "I have never used steroids, period."
It didn't turn out that way.
Now it looks like Jose Canseco - whose book "Juiced" detailed all kinds of performance enhancing drug allegations - may have been telling the most truth in that House hearing room.
I was going through my mental Rolodex of all the big hearings that I have covered in over 20 years of reporting on Capitol Hill, and another hearing that immediately came to mind was one where Congress hauled in the heads of a group of Big Tobacco cigarette makers.
With tobacco executives under oath in that 1994 hearing, all seven swore that smoking was not addictive and that tobacco use did not lead to any diseases.
It was a public relations disaster in the long run for cigarette makers, from which Big Tobacco never really recovered, starting them on a slide that would ultimately result in new restrictions on cigarettes.
It is a reminder that Congress can throw its weight around on a lot of different subjects which are not expressly political in nature.
Unfortunately, both parties seem reluctant to do that, except if it is something political, a gotcha hearing on the White House when it is controlled by the other party.
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