Might and Braun
Ryan Braun, guilty until proven innocent, has had his 50-game steroid suspension for this season eliminated through legal appeal, apparently because of embarrassing-awful testing procedures by the league. Not good news for Braun's division-neighbors, the St. Louis Cardinals, competitively, but color me thrilled.
The steroid hunters are pissed, of course. The Brewers' Braun had a pre-Division Series test turn up positive this winter after winning the MVP award in November for the National League, and the specifics don't matter to this bunch. Fans, and most sports journalists, know nothing about the testing process of course, how often players get tested, how they're tested, what substances they're tested for, what the alleged substances do, how accurate the tests are, what could conceivably cause a false positive, none of it. The process has had no transparency to it whatsoever over its almost first near-decade, and a majority of the major and minor leaguers that have tested positive and faced suspension have been foreign-born players from non-English speaking countries that are decidedly not stars of the caliber of Ryan Braun.
Players have everything to lose by juicing, and little to gain other than recovering faster from injury, which everybody should be rooting for. Heightened testosterone does nothing to increase bat speed or the ability to increase the frequency of contact between a bat and a baseball. A scientific link between steroid use and statistical performance in baseball, or any sport for that matter, has never been proven by scientific study. Yet many are convinced that Ryan Braun is a cheater whose entire career should now be considered illegitimate, despite those facts and this verdict.
Let's be clear-- Braun has not been exonerated on a mere technicality, an undotted 'i' or an uncrossed 't', as it were. A three-member panel cleared the slugger, who has passed 25 other drug tests during his career, including three last year, because of what was considered to be substantial doubt about the physical handling of the particular test. It has been acknowledged that Braun's sample sat in a Wisconsin man's refrigerator over a weekend last fall when Major League Baseball's local pee collector in Milwaukee didn't know the shipping hours for the nearby Fed Ex/Kinkos.
The CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency called the panel's decision a "kick in the gut," and termed it "the technicality of all technicalities," but then that organization is also opposed to vitamins, and the man wouldn't have much of a career without the cottage industry of drug testing that now surrounds sports at almost all levels. Major League Baseball, with its typical and almost preternatural impulse to defame its own stars and its own product in a way that no other organized sport does, "vehemently disagrees with the decision," according to a media release. Nabbing a league MVP for committing performance fraud immediately following the 2011 playoffs was proof positive that baseball team owners take drug testing seriously, even if said-MVP does play in far away Milwaukee. As Gabe Feldman of the Tulane Sports Law Center points out though-- if the "chain of custody" of urine samples is a mere "technicality," it wouldn't be mentioned 33 times in the league's drug policy. What does an impure handling process also say about the alleged purity of the chemical analysis? How many lesser players than Braun, down to the lowest levels of the minor leagues, haven't had the same legal backing to challenge the accuracy of their positive test?
Of course, club owners are all for drug testing. They're not subjected to it. Nobody comes to the ballpark to see them, though they keep roughly $5 billion of the league's $8 billion annual profit. Their business couldn't exist without players. Yet it could do just fine without them, and they know this fact down deep. The union's mistake, as its first executive director Marvin Miller has always maintained, was agreeing to drug testing in the first place. Unions should never be bargaining away Constitutionally-protected privacy rights, and it should never be an employer's job to be policing drug use. Miller has predicted that a player will ultimately wind up in prison as a result of testing, and the Department of Justice went to the wall to try to do just that to Barry Bonds (at least in a related perjury case). Incidentally, your government can't order random drug testing of individual Americans. Congress can't do it, the president can't. Why is Major League Baseball even concerning themselves with this? Its teams haven't suffered financially during any part of the so-called "steroid era," in fact they've thrived. The argument that fans equate steroid charges in the media with unfair competition runs counter to the reality of gate receipts, and television, radio, and internet profit. Oh yeah, but there is that little fear among club owners that the league's antitrust exemption might be removed if they don't bow to Congress at every turn. At some point, somebody in power in Washington might capriciously decide to right that odious wrong.
This was a happy week in baseball. Spring workouts began in Florida and Arizona, the reigning NL MVP was, indeed, exonerated, by definition, of the alleged use of banned performance enhancers, and the league's outrageously intrusive drug policy got dented like a middle-in fastball off the bat of Ryan Braun.
posted by CM @ 7:54 AM
1 Comments:
Perfect commentary on this issue.
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