“Who knows what was going on with [Braun’s] situation, but for the most part the drug tester that we worked with ... we all know him as well, and he handles his business pretty professionally. And I think that everyone in this clubhouse would agree with me,” Cubs outfielder Reed Johnson said Friday on “The Waddle & Silvy Show” on ESPN 1000.
Cubs infielder Jeff Baker told the Chicago Sun-Times that he has had no problems with Laurenzi.
“Just from knowing Dino the three years I’ve been here, he’s been nothing but professional,” Baker told the paper. “He’s been very, very thorough. I have no concerns and no qualms.’” . . .
The process to me is something a lot of the guys in the clubhouse really trust,” Johnson said. “Obviously, you don’t want your sample going to somebody’s house and sitting around for a couple of days, but you know that that process of them taking your sample and sealing it inside a case, stickers over it and that’s inside a bag, stickers over that and that’s inside a sealed box, stickers over that.
“When you see the process and the detail that goes into that type of drug testing, you really do feel safe that nothing is going to happen.”
Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano said he would not be worried about his sample regardless of who is collecting it.
“I’m not worried that it’s the same guy,” Soriano told the Sun-Times. “‘I’m not worried because I know what I take. It doesn’t matter who takes the sample. If you don’t take nothing, he can take [the specimen] home for a week and nothing will come out.”
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1. Koot Posted: March 03, 2012 at 09:03 AM (#4073230)Given that he's obviously been doing this for a while and the general public never heard of the guy until a few days ago, I'm going to say no.
This is called "cognitive dissonance", right?
Just like Tim Donaghy, right?
Undetected sarcasm perhaps? Probably not but you can't tell from a quote. I liked Soriano's unintentional (maybe?) shot at Braun.
I shudder to think what Braun's pee would get on E-Bay.
And nobody answered in the other thread so since some eyeballs on this one -- not accusing the guy of anything but how hard would it be to tamper with the vial before Braun pissed in it? Rub a drop of something around the vial? Or just get contaminated somehow?
I'm assuming still not very easy since I assume it's in some sort of "hygienic" wrapping.
Moises Alou?
The cup I pissed in at a physical yesterday was sealed with a sticker; if I had wanted to, I could easily have removed and then replaced it. I would hope the drug testing had better protections.
You wouldn't want to mess with the collection cup, because the donor might notice. If you were going to do this, you'd contaminate the vials that the sample gets transferred into.
I have to provide drug test samples regularly, and they always ask me to inspect, then rinse the vial in the sink before filling. All while being watched by the administrator. I guess something oily and clear could survive that, since it's usually just a perfunctory rinse, and of course there's no guarantee MLB players follow a similar process, but it makes sense.
Stabler: Our victim is a 36 year-old tobacco executive.
Benson: I guess it's true what they say. Smoking kills.
CHUNG CHUNK
FWIW, this is not allowed.
But when he croaks, you can sell his skull and his bones for medical research, as long as he's not a Native American Indian.
Are Canadian First Nation skulls allowed?
It is very important that I get an answer on this by 3pm Monday.
The NY Times interviewed Laurenzi and provided details about the collection process.
That's ########. I have all these Native American Indian skulls and bones lying around my basement that I want to sell, and they're interfering with me reaching potential buyers. Free market, yeah right.
Maybe if you stuck one of those Mohegan cigarettes in the skull's mouth you could call the skull a cigarette holder. There'd be a certain amount of irony involved, but ebay is famous for its sense of humor.
Always be forgetting where his keys are. Be drunk. Have used motor oil all over his hands. Use a completely unique procedure every time you do the sample acquisition. Laugh at an inopportune time.
Howard Hughes?
It's incredibly easy to taint the sample cup prior to it being sealed. Not to mention, in the universe of fraudulent activity, it's basically childs play to unseal and reseal the sample.
I explained in the prior thread(s) that the PED Braun tested for is probably the easiest to plan into a sample. Axiron, the T found in the sample, is usually distributed as an under-arm application, like deodorant. You can simply swipe a finger on the applicator and while handling the sample and sealing it, you can easily touch under the cap or edge of the inside rim of the cup. Easy.
The claim that the sample is secure merely because there is a bag, within a bag, within bag is silly and it ignores the simplicity of tampering prior to being sealed.
*probably the easiest (PED) to plant a sample*
Whenever I see or hear someone say, "Now I'm not saying..." I think about Louis C.K.'s bit about people who literally say "the N-word." Yeah, they aren't actually saying it, but they are definitely planting the idea in your head.
(1) I didn't realize there was a transfer from cup to vial and tampering with the vials would be the easiest but ...
(2) I assume a teeny-weeny amount, less than a drop, directly in a urine sample is plenty so a dab with a q-tip, not sure that's noticeable.
Ever since then I dread drug tests. I have to drink two Wendy's biggie diet cokes before the test to even have a chance.
?? Cripes, they drug tested you for a crummy movie usher job? What's the worst thing that can happen if you show up to work wrecked- eat too much of the popcorn?
The Greeks had a name for that kinda thing...
You are not alone
You are not alone
I've been a comics page addict since I was about 3 years old, and with the possible exception of Pogo, I can't think of a strip that's ever been as consistently funny for as many years as Dilbert. Unlike almost every other strip this side of Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, he almost never has a truly bad day. Pearls Before Swine approaches it, but it still hasn't quite gotten all the way up there.
It may just be that my taste runs to misanthropic sarcasm much more than to stupid puns or ha-ha jokes, but I still think that Scott Adams is a ####### genius, and I've never worked in an office.
Not speaking for or against the feasibility of such a plot; but it seems to me that if the Cubs fan piss collector had hatched a scheme to snare Ryan Braun with a tainted sample holder, then it would be in the piss collector's best interest to do everything in his power to make sure that the tainted sample was delivered as quickly as possible, so as to avoid attracting suspicion.
Indeed, if one really wants to go all conspiracy theory [cue appropriate music] consider this: perhaps Braun, knowing that he would likely test positive, made a deal with the piss collector to deliberately fail to follow the required delivery procedure, thus making a way out for Braun.
I mean, if we're going to think way outside the box, let's think outside all sides of the box.
DB
I've wrote several times I think it is more likely Braun used T than Dino planted T. I'm merely sharing evidence that Dino was a Cubs fans and offering a possible motive for planting. Just about every crime needs a motive, being a Cubs fan probably isn't enough, but it isn't meaningless when trying to come up with a motive.
Actually, successfully doping a sample sounds like it's harder than you might think. Most of the obvious tricks seem to have been planned for, and we haven't even touched the issue of altering the concentrations in two samples to be
1) consistent with each other, and
2) biologically plausible
The discussion about tainting samples seems kind of unmoored, like dorm-room bull sessions about committing the perfect murder.
The trouble with motive is that, by definition, anybody who commits a crime had a motive sufficient to make them do it, while anyone who didn't, didn't.
Being a super-deranged Cubs fan who would do anything to get a rival player suspended the next season would certainly be one of the odder motives you'd ever read about. If you had proof that the guy did it, it certainly might help put an odd crime in perspective. But it would be really strange to see someone throw away their personal reputation and a job they had held for 16 years based on fandom. You'd almost expect mental illness as a contributing factor.
The Far Side? Life in Hell? Those were always funny, in a misanthropic, sarcastic kind of way.
Since when are criminal motives always rational? Motive is almost always present in crimes. Sometimes a motive is simple, like wanting more money, etc. #43, there is a key distinction between using motive to determine guilt and using it as a lead in an investigation, very different.
You've been around here for a while, so a discussion unmoored from reality should hardly come as a surprise to you.
The Far Side? Life in Hell? Those were always funny, in a misanthropic, sarcastic kind of way.
The Far Side blew hot and cold, great at its best but punching a clock much of the time. Life in Hell was a weekly strip and didn't face the same pressure as a daily.
Actually, this is probably the easy part. A few minutes of googling will take care of the biologically plausible part, and how hard do you think it is to spike two samples the same way? I think the science geek part would be a relative piece of cake compared to the Neal Caffrey part. Unless you're Neal Caffrey, of course.
But anyway, the whole point of the process is supposed to be to take the collector's character out of the equation. If you have an air-tight procedure and you document that it's followed to a "T" (see what I did there?), then your collectors can all be escaped cons and it won't matter. Similarly, discussions of motive miss the point -- there was opportunity when there should not have been, and that settles the issue right there.
From a legal/arbitrator perpective, yes. But if a person is trying to form their own opinion of whether Braun cheated, it doesn't really settle it.
If a person is trying to form their own opinion, then whatever they choose to settle it on settles it. It's simply a matter of their own opinion after all. All of this hair-splitting isn't going to change anyone's opinion. Arguments that one opinion is the right one because all the other ones are based on giving this or that too much or too little weight, while perhaps sociologically fascinating, aren't particularly interesting or informative about what really happened in any particular case.
i can think of LOTS and LOTS of crimes i have motive to commit. say, for example, having put an end to seligula a LONG time ago before he could destroy my baseball team. and if he had dropped dead in houston it didn't mean that i would have been responsible
Again, this is one of those harder-than-it-looks details. Consider Deca-Durabolin, one of the most common steroids. Deca-Durabolin is actually the commercial name for nandrolone decanoate, and is sold in a suspension of benzyl alcohol. In the body, it's hydrolized to nandrolone, which is metabolized by the liver into 19-norandrosterone, 19-noretiocholanolone, and 19-norepiandrosterone. Other metabolites are not mentioned in the data sheet I found, but may also have to be matched in order to fool a lab test.
So in practice, you can't dope a urine sample with Deca-Durabolin. The presence of benzyl alcohol or nandrolone decanoate in the sample would be a screaming giveaway, and you can't easily come by samples of the metabolites that the test actually looks for.
If you have an organic chemist around to prepare samples of the metabolites, he can't give you your doctoring agent in a solution, because the solvating agent will show up in any test the lab cares to run. On the other hand, the amounts which yield a positive test result are on the order of 2 nanograms per milliliter. So depending on the size of the sample, you've got to add a few hundred nanograms of three or more commercially unavailable metabolites in the right proportions to one another and to the total amount of urine in each sample.
Bear in mind that your request for biologically inactive metabolites of a common steroid will be extremely unusual, and will definitely be remembered by the chemist who prepared them. It will look incredibly suspicious to anybody who knows that you're a urine tester by trade, and any cops who hear about it will be more than halfway to putting you behind bars. A lab test which reports positive for the metabolites you were able to obtain, but negative for the ones you weren't will also be incredibly incriminating.
that would be complicated. much MUCH easier to do the manufactured testosterone
You could potentially switch out the urine, but that's not what we're arguing about at the moment, and has its own set of difficulties. But again, we're back to arguing ways to commit the perfect crime, without any mooring in fact.
In theory, yes and therefore the absence of motive is an indicator of "not guiltiness".
Although this overstates things anyway. As bbc points out, we all got motive. Also, most crime is a drunk/high idiot doing something without thinking.
Being a super-deranged Cubs fan who would do anything to get a rival player suspended the next season would certainly be one of the odder motives you'd ever read about.
Right, which is evidence that the guy didn't do it ... or he's an obsessed nutbar but we have no evidence of that. You'd have to be way around the bend to believe the 2012 Cubs are better than the Brewers minus Braun for 50 games ... and the Reds ... and the Cards ... and ...
My raising the tampering isn't to accuse the guy of anything -- I've got no reason to think he did so and, hey, I'm a Cub fan so I'm not going to object strongly to Braun missing 50 games which is why I tampered with the sample ... I was just curious because all anybody talked about here was the impossibility of breaking the 15 seals that are slapped around it after the urine was in there. Just noting the blind spot in that discussion and asking what's possible.
But unlike Deca-Durabolin with all the complexities of its metabolic breakdown products, you can simply spike a sample with testosterone.
No you can't, any more than you can put a $20 bill in a copy machine and expect to pass it at WalMart. A liquid chromatography mass spectrometry machine will show many different peaks for every steroid and metabolite that appears in the sample, whether or not that species is counted toward a positive test result. A sample which only shows testosterone and none of its metabolites will look nothing like a sample which is taken from a true cheater, and the difference will be obvious to any lab tech trained in detecting steroids. You might as well jump up and down waving a sign saying "This sample was spiked!"
I love the blithe assumption -- "Hey, the piss collector could just rub a Q-tip of testosterone on the inside of the tube" -- as if no one anywhere, in the four-plus decades of sports drug testing, had ever thought of that.
It is certainly true that it's very unlikely that a bunch of goofballs on a website are going to come up with a simple way to screw with a drug test. One that was negotiated bewteen a high profile company and a high profile labor union. And administered by a company and a lab whose job it is to administer these tests.
A 'White Collar' reference. Thanks!
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