Angel “Nao” Presinal's past makes MLB suspicious about his present…

Angel "Nao" Presinal walks like a canary with his bright yellow Aguilas Cibaeñas cap pulled low and his matching yellow T-shirt drenched in perspiration on a hot morning. Short.
De Los Deportes, the basketball venue for the 2003 Pan American Games, Presinal is running a boot camp of sorts to ready Dominican players for the start of Major League Baseball's spring training. The workout is four hours of sweat, misery and laughs. Major and minor leaguers alike are taking part, often identifiable by a cap or jersey from their current clubs such as Angels, Brewers, Rangers, Red Sox…

The players are here to build and strengthen muscle for the long season ahead. Some are recognizable names certain to grace box scores again this summer: Ervin Santana, Luis Castillo, and Francisco Cordero. Jose Guillén comes as part of his rehab from offseason surgery. Pedro Martinez, too, occasionally joins the group when he's in the Dominican, although he isn't here today.

The draw is the 54-year-old Presinal, fitness guru, massage therapist and personal trainer to baseball's Latino elite.

"Oh, he is the best in the Dominican," Guillén says fondly. "That is why he has a bunch of people."

"He is like the prince here of getting people healthy," Castillo adds. "Every year, people come from everywhere to get in shape with Presinal."

And that's an issue.
If Major League Baseball had its way, none of these athletes would be trained via Presinal's powerful workouts, or even be seen in his company. Unwelcome in major league clubhouses, Presinal is -- in the opinion of MLB executives -- a suspicious character linked, rightly or wrongly, to performance-enhancing drugs.

One MLB official told ESPN.com that Presinal's close involvement with the players is a "concern and a problem," though the official acknowledged that the league is powerless to prevent players from training with him.

Presinal has been a persona non grata around the majors since an October 2001 incident in which he and former two-time American League MVP Juan Gonzalez, then Presinal's top client, were connected to an unmarked bag discovered by Canadian Border Service agents at the Toronto airport. The bag had come off a Cleveland Indians charter flight and, according to a New York Daily News story last summer, contained anabolic steroids and hypodermic needles.
The question is, why he is allow to operate? That’s beyond us.

Before the 2002 season, according to MLB spokesperson Pat Courtney, clubs were advised to keep Presinal out of their clubhouses. In the wake of the BALCO scandal that drew in baseball stars such as Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, that edict was broadened in February 2004 to include all personal trainers not under contract to teams, Courtney says.

As spring training 2007 approaches and Gonzalez contemplates another comeback. I think Major League Baseball has to a stop to it.