Braun and Reputations

I like Ryan Braun. He’s a great player. He’s fun to watch, and he does it all. He seems to be a very cool and likeable guy. I saw him in spring training last season, and after my group of friends’ brief interaction with him in left field, I was impressed. He was confident, but not cocky, when a friend told him he had him on his fantasy team. Braun said something along the lines of, “I got your back.” Yeah, he wound up having an MVP season.

I’m not sure what any of this has to do with Braun winning his appeal of the 50-game suspension he was facing for failing a drug test. Honestly, I’m not sure still what I think of him winning the appeal. I’m not sure what it means for MLB and for Braun’s reputation.

What we do know is that Braun wasn’t disputing the fact that the sample was positive with synthetic testosterone. His team of lawyers based their argument on how the sample was handled after it was obtained. According to Jeff Passan from Yahoo Sports:

Ryan Braun beat the program Thursday. His lawyers never bothered arguing whether or not Braun had taken the synthetic testosterone that showed up in his urine during the 2011 playoffs. They argued about the urine that showed up in the cup, which Braun signed to affirm had been sealed and packaged correctly. And they argued about the cup that went into a box that was supposed to go to FedEx that Saturday night. And they argued that because the FedEx store was closed and the test collector took the sample home and put it in his refrigerator until Monday – the standard-operating procedure in every major doping program across the world but one not spelled out distinctly among Selig’s 18,175 words – that the sample did not follow the proper chain of custody and thus was invalid.

Major League Baseball has had a huge public relations mess over the last two decades worth of performance enhancing drug scandals. Once MLB started to take strong actions to clean up the league, it really seemed like it was working. It appears that fewer and fewer players are trying to get away with doping because the consequences are so extreme and the testing is much more rigorous.

Even though MLB is going to allow Braun to play this season, I don’t think this makes them look bad. Braun comes out of this with his tainted MVP season, and the fans know he won the appeal on a technicality. But now the question is: Do fans really care about positive drug tests anymore? I mean, we want the game to be clean, but after the Mitchell Report, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, and other roided-up superstars, are fans immune to this? For me, that’s more uncertainty. I don’t know how to feel about Ryan Braun, because I really want to like him. But in the end, he likely cheated and got away with it on a loophole.