Dino Laurenzi Jr. has a bachelor’s degree in athletic training, a master’s degree in sports medicine and another master’s in business administration. He is the son of a pharmacist and runs the rehabilitation services department at a health care facility in Kenosha, Wis. He is active in his church and a mainstay in Pleasant Prairie, his hometown.
Since 2005, Laurenzi has also collected more than 600 urine samples from players in Major League Baseball, a later-life bit of work that has thrust him into a firestorm over Ryan Braun’s successful appeal of his 50-game suspension for testing positive after a drug test taken in October. Last week, Braun became the first major league player known to have his suspension overturned. Braun successfully argued that Laurenzi’s decision to store the urine sample at his home as he waited for a FedEx outlet to open did not comport with the letter of the protocols laid out in baseball’s drug-testing program.
Braun, recognizing that his legal victory did not remove suspicions that he had indeed cheated, held a news conference last Friday during which he all but accused Laurenzi of mishandling or tampering with the urine sample, which ultimately showed very high levels of synthetic testosterone.
“There were a lot of things that we learned about the collector, about the collection process, about the way the entire thing works, that made us very concerned and very suspicious about what could have actually happened,” Braun, who did not name Laurenzi, said Friday at the Brewers’ camp in Phoenix.
Braun offered no evidence and failed to make clear to the public what baseball officials and Braun’s representatives agree on: Braun, when making his case to an independent arbitrator, never argued that he or anyone else had details that Laurenzi tampered with the samples, deliberately or otherwise.
