Deceptive and misleading spin tactics are being used by the Major League Baseball Players Association to manipulate the public’s opinion to defend J.C Romero and Sergio Mitre. After the MLB baseball players have been tested and have been proven positive in using androstenedione, an anabolic steroid. They have been suspended from playing in the MLB under the MLB’s drug policy.

“In our view, J.C. is being unfairly punished because a supplement he purchased in a retail store contained a minute trace of a banned substance.”

MLBPA’s general counsel, Michael Weiner, attacked the media interview circuit blaming contaminated dietary supplements for the androstenedione positives.

“Nothing on the labels of those supplements indicated that they contained a trace amount of a substance prohibited under Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program,” Weiner stressed.

NSF International which is the company paid to certify supplements for Major League Baseball was complicit to the MLBPA’s public relations campaign to solely blame the dietary supplement industry.

“There is a certain segment of the market where we’re not convinced isn’t adulterating their products,” Wyszumiala said. “Maybe this is a case where a company would spike a product in order to gain market share.

“We don’t see such contamination,” Arnold wrote. “I certainly would like to hear more about what MLB says they found, as we take quality control very seriously.” The misinterpretation of a 2006 article appearing in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is regarded to be the root for blaming contamination in 6-OXO androstenedione positives. David Murphy explains the rationale for MLBPA/Romero/Mitre apologia.

Romero walked into a nutritional store in Cherry Hill, purchased a legal supplement called 6-OXO, and unwittingly ingested a chemical compound that urinalysis revealed to have contained the infamous steroid precursor androstenedione.

In fact, problems with 6-OXO are not very surprising. Looking back in 2006, a story in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry & Molecular Biology has been published by a team of Dutch scientists saying that tests had revealed traces of andro in the product.

The journal article greatly misinterpreted the erroneous conclusion that 6-OXO was contaminated with androstenedione, giving the people and its readers the wrong impression. Urinary metabolites do NOT prove contamination; various different compounds can produce the same urinary metabolites.

Dr. Bryan Smith, the administrator of MLB’s anti-doping program, confirmed that MLB screens for androstenedione metabolites today. He also made a report summarizing 2008 MLB positive doping results which included two androstenedione positives (presumably Romero and Mitre). It was previously thought that a specific test for androstenedione was not part of the MLB anti-doping protocol; we believe the MLB has adopted the 6a-OH-androstenedione technique as a marker for the detection of androstenedione use.

It can therefore be concluded that the false analytical positive for androstenedione use by J.C Romero and Sergio Mitre doping case can be proven basing on this new information alone. The question is, are they really innocent? Probably not.

The World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and the Major League Baseball (MLB) explicity bans aromatase inhibitors. 6-OXO has clearly been considered a banned and/or prohibited substance by anti-doping scientists as extensively documented in the scientific literature. Ironically, even the journal article that was used to divert blame for Romero and Mitre’s androstenedione positives to a dietary supplement discussed 6-OXO as a prohibited performance enhancing drug.

The entire “androstenedione contamination” defense appears to have obfuscated the fact that 6-OXO itself, as an aromatase inhibitor, is banned by the MLB anyway.

The Major League Player Association’s attempt to unfairly use the dietary supplement industry could be regarded as the biggest injustice in the entire Romeo and Mitre doping scandal using Ergopharm and Patrick Arnold as scapegoats, whether out of ignorance or intentional deceit, in this case.

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