Baseball Union succeeds where John McCain fails

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Since Congress won’t protect you—or major league baseball players—from dangerous supplements, the Major League Baseball Players Union has just sent out a list of 104 supplements its players should avoid.

The union terms the supplements “dangerous/contaminated,” in a clear an attempt help its players steer clear of substances that would falsely test positive for performance enhancing drugs. A previous version of this list distributed to players was called “Non-Exclusive List of Potentially Contaminated Nutritional Supplements,” but it only listed 21 supplements.

The list was circulated Tuesday, a day after John McCain withdrew support for his own bill that would have required supplement makers to list the ingredient of their products on their labels. The bill also would have required supplement makers to report adverse effects from using their products—including little things like liver failure, heart attacks, and deaths—which they currently don’t have to do. All four professional leagues and their unions have been pushing for years for the kind of legislation that McCain just killed.

“Baseball players are held responsible for any positive drug tests that might occur from using dietary supplements that contain banned substances—even though there’s no way for them to know the supplements are tainted,” Victor Conte, who now heads up SNAC System, told me. “At least this list tells them which supplements should definitely to be avoided. But this doesn’t mean that there are other supplements that could cause problems.”

Over at Digg.com, several readers of my story on McCain’s flip flop wrote that I was sensationalizing the issue, insisting that supplement makers would never put illegal or banned substances in products that are easily purchased in health food stores and over the internet.

Clearly, the baseball players union disagrees.