Drug Test Collector in Braun Case Says He Followed Protocol The increasingly combative dispute between Major League Baseball and Ryan Braun grew louder Tuesday when Dino Laurenzi Jr., the drug test collector who handled Braun's urine sample in October, said that he followed protocol when he took the sample home instead of sending it directly to a testing laboratory. "I followed the same procedure in collecting Mr. Braun's sample as I did in the hundreds of other samples I collected under the program," Laurenzi said in a statement, referring to the drug testing program administered by Major League Baseball and the players union. At no point did I tamper in any way with the samples. Laurenzi, a drug test collector for Comprehensive Drug Testing, the company hired by Major League Baseball and the players union to collect samples from players, has been at the center of a storm since Friday, when Braun raised questions in a news conference about why his sample and those of two other players were not immediately taken to a FedEx shipping office and spent the weekend in Laurenzi's house. Laurenzi's decision to take the samples home and the resulting gap in the chain of custody were the main reasons an arbitrator reversed Braun's 50-game suspension for failing the drug test. Braun is the first major league player known to have won an appeal of a suspension for violating the league's drug policy. In a statement, Laurenzi said he followed established protocol by taking the samples home because by the time he left Miller Park that Saturday in October, the last FedEx flights of the day had left. It was better to keep the samples in a secure location than leave them in a FedEx office, where they could have been tampered with or not properly refrigerated. His employer, C.D.T., has told collectors to keep samples in their possession when they are unable to be shipped, Laurenzi said. "The protocol has been in place since 2005 when I started with C.D.T., and there have been other occasions when I have had to store samples in my home for at least one day, all without incident," Laurenzi said in his statement. Without naming Laurenzi directly, Braun suggested there were questions about his character and the possibility that Laurenzi or his son, who accompanied him to the stadium that day, might have doctored the sample or inadvertently compromised it. "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 said at the news conference Friday, at the Brewers" training camp in Phoenix. Braun's veiled allegations have "caused great emotional distress for me and my family," Laurenzi said. I have worked hard my entire life, have performed my job duties with integrity and professionalism, and have done so with respect to this matter and all other collections in which I have participated. Laurenzi has hired Boyd Johnson, a prominent lawyer, to represent him.