If you haven’t read Susan Slusser’s excellent piece on Tim Kubinski, it’s very much worth your time. It held a special place in my heart because I was fortunate enough to know Kubinski as he passed through Southern Oregon in 1993 on his way to a couple cups of coffee in the big leagues.
Kubinski’s own story of a baseball player whose use of pain killers led to addiction is not nearly as rare as we might like to imagine. We hear about it only when it becomes newsworthy, as it unfortunately did with Tyler Skaggs, but as Kubinski details there are scores of MLB players struggling under the radar.