Ken Caminiti just had to win. Maybe he had to win a little too badly.The 1996 National League Most Valuable Player died Sunday of a heart attack in the Bronx. He was 41. Caminiti played for the San Diego Padres, Houston Astros, Texas Rangers and Atlanta Braves during his 15-year Major League career. Caminiti's career numbers were solid: a .272 batting average with 239 home runs and 983 RBI.

But in this case, statistics don't tell the whole story. Caminiti was best known for a lot of things during his career. First, it was for winning the National League MVP award with San Diego in 1996. Then it was for leading the Padres to only their second World Series in team history, in 1998 against the New York Yankees. But in 2002, one year after he retired, Caminiti became best known for something else: steroid use.

In July of that year he told Sports Illustrated that he had used steroids during his MVP season, one in which he batted .326 with 40 home runs and 130 RBI. But Caminiti didn't stop there, going on to say that half of Major Leaguers use some type of performance-enhancing drugs. These accusations sent shockwaves throughout the baseball world, as players and owners denied Caminiti's accusation and fans demanded mandatory drug testing. At the time, I was a 19-year-old die-hard baseball fan and I still believed that the game had some purity and innocence left in it. Many had suspected that baseball players were juicing, but I didn't want to believe it. Then Caminiti came along and destroyed all that as he had once destroyed Major League pitching.

Now, the killer of my baseball innocence is dead himself. So how should he be remembered? Most will likely remember him as just another drug cheat. While Caminiti deserves a degree of infamy, he also deserves a degree of reverence. He is the first player to admit using steroids. Granted, he did so after his playing days were over, but he did so voluntarily with no foreseeable gain. Had Caminiti not come clean, there might still not be any drug testing in Major League Baseball today. While the testing program remains grossly inadequate, it is Caminiti who got the ball rolling. And with the exception of the Yankees' Gary Sheffield and former major-leaguer Jose Canseco, he is still the only pro baseball player who admitted to using banned performance enhancers.

But unlike Sheffield and Canseco, he tried to make peace with the transgressions of his past. According to Sports Illustrated, Caminiti had hoped to get back into baseball in order to caution younger players against the dangers of using steroids. But his untimely death cut his plans short and left many in the baseball community saddened.

"The best way to describe him is that he was a warrior in every sense of the word," San Diego Padres general manager Kevin Towers said to Sports Illustrated. "I can't tell you how many times I remember him hobbling into the manager's office, barely able to walk and saying, 'Put me in the lineup."'

Others expressed mixed feelings about Caminiti's legacy.

"I'm saddened by the news. He was a terrific kid, it's unfortunate," Phil Garner, who managed Caminiti, told Sports Illustrated. "What we all loved about Cammy was his devotion to the game and his desire for the game. But it went into uncontrollable levels with no discipline," he said.

While the cause of Caminiti's heart attack is not yet known, it seems reasonable to conclude that steroids played at least some role in his untimely death. And he was certainly no saint, pleading guilty to violating his parole by using cocaine just last Tuesday. By voluntarily coming clean about his steroid use, seemingly for no personal gain, Caminiti sets himself above virtually all other drug cheats. But when he showed a desire to help others avoid the mistakes he made, he set himself above many other human beings.

While he could not help others with his words, his death is surely a cautionary tale to all athletes. It is a true tragedy that so few others have followed Caminiti's example by coming clean about their own steroid use, then trying to help others make better decisions with their lives.