J.C. Romero, Next Phase of MLB’s Drug War

The news is everywhere today –- Phils’ lefty J.C. Romero and Yankees’ righty Sergio Mitre have been suspended for 50 games by Major League Baseball for using banned nutritional supplements.
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↵It’s old hat for the league at this point, drug suspensions, and yet these two have a twist. Neither is being officially accused of cheating by the league, but rather, “negligence” for not knowing that products that they purchased at GNC contained ingredients that would cause them to test positive in an MLB drug test.
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↵Romero is angrily crying foul to the press, insisting that he bought the supplement in question over-the-counter and then had it cleared by his nutritionist and a Phillies’ trainer. And while these types of outraged denials and assertions of using nothing but vitamins have become standard for players found guilty of doping, in this case it seems that Romero did in fact test positive due to a supplement that he obtained legally from GNC. After learning of the situation surrounding Romero and Mitre, the players’ union sent out a letter in November warning players that three products currently sold at GNC could trigger a positive result.
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↵As I was reading about all of this, I couldn’t help but think of Andreea Raducan, the Romanian gymnast who was stripped of her all-around gold medal at the Sydney Olympics after testing positive for pseudoephedrine, a mild stimulant found in most cold medicines, but nevertheless among the IOC’s banned substances.
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No one ever disputed what happened in the case of Raducan. She had a bad cold during the competition and her coach gave her a decongestant. No one believed that she or her coach were trying to cheat or that the pseudoephedrine boosted her performance in the slightest. And yet there was no mercy, and the reason for that was unyieldingly plain – the reputation of the Olympics has been so severely tarnished by drug scandals over the last twenty years that the IOC now has no choice but to take a very hard line against all infractions, innocent mistakes though they may have been.
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↵In the post-Bonds era, MLB is in similar straits, and Romero and Mitre are the first casualties. I doubt either will garner anywhere near the type of sympathy that Raducan did for her plight. After all, they’re not cute little teenage girls. And maybe they’re not quite as innocent as Raducan was either - who knows? But I suspect that they’re caught up in the same kind of situation that ensnared the young gymnast and that like her they’ll have no recourse but to take their suspensions and go on with their lives. In sports as in life, no drug war is without its collateral damage.↵