On the morning of Aug. 21, 1998, Mark McGwire awoke in a New York City hotel room after playing all 18 innings of a doubleheader in Queens the day before. Throughout his 13-year career, he had steadily and successfully transformed himself from Olympic prodigy to beloved Oakland bash brother to America's favorite goateed redhead. (Not that there's much competition for that last distinction, but still.) In 1998, McGwire had clubbed 50 home runs since an Opening Day grand slam and his march toward shattering Roger Maris' single-season home run mark felt as inexorable as the tide. His stats were positively Ruthian, at a time in baseball when that reference still felt dusty from 50 years of underuse.

So this is where we were on Aug. 21 when McGwire stepped into the batter's box at Shea Stadium in the ninth inning of the first game of yet another doubleheader and slapped an easy pinch-hit double to left field. This was McGwire's 1,500th career game. The final 374 would feel quite different. That's because Aug. 21, 1998, was the day Associated Press sportswriter Steve Wilstein published a 1,082-word wire report under the very AP-y headline "'Andro' OK in baseball, not Olympics." Wilstein had happened to see a bottle of a steroid called androstenedione — which Olympic athletes were prohibited from using — in McGwire's locker, and he wrote about it. With that, the very public devolution of Mark McGwire's reputation, as well as those of dozens of his contemporaries, began in earnest, and the sport's long-whispered-about steroid culture finally graduated onto a very public stage.

Now, nearly 15 years after that day, Wilstein has largely receded from the spotlight that made him a national hero to some and a drama-seeking snitch to others. With MLB commissioner Bud Selig seemingly about to levy some of the harshest performance-enhancing drug-use penalties in sports history, Wilstein is at peace with his role vis-à-vis PEDs, which he views plainly as cheating, even if he's not under the impression that the game is much different than it was in 1998.

"I don't think the world's changing a whole lot. It's just that some keep secrets better and some get away with it more," he says. Wilstein has been retired for almost eight years and spends his free time dabbling in sports photography, hitting the cruise-ship speaking circuit, and just relaxing with friends and family, as he was last Friday on Cape Cod when I spoke to him about his career and what's come from the past decade and a half. He's also working on a memoir, so he still thinks and talks about steroids often.

"Had I not written that story — and had other people not written other stories, like BALCO and other ones that followed — baseball players would be walking around like Michelin Men," he says. "People were upset that I wrote about it during this big, great season of home runs, but if you think back, if that had not happened, and if people kept developing that way, it would be a really grotesque sport filled with cheaters, and that's not how Americans want to see baseball play out. They don't want them to look like Bulgarian weight lifters."