General Sports Water Cooler

I don't know or care if he's guilty. The only thing that caught my attention about this is the ridiculous excuses some people are making. For example, how does the following sentence apply to the collector but not Braun: "considering his career and reputation is on the line here, it's not a surprise he would go into denial mode." Also, isn't every player clean up to the point that they cheat? The previous clean tests don't really mean anything. Manny was clean until he got caught cheating, wasn't he?

I'm not sure if you've had to take a piss test before, but it would be pretty obvious if someone tampered with the package containing the sample. It was sealed multiple times with Braun's signature placed on the package after it was sealed. What does the collector have to gain by tampering with sample anyway? Apparently he's done this hundreds of times and it's never been an issue. And the theory that a sample stored at room temperature can produce an absurdly high steroid level seems even more ridiculous to me.

Yeah again as I said in my last post, I don't know how you can take one side as fact and not the other. There's clearly a lot of grey area in this case and to definitively say he is 100% guilty or 100% innocent is pretty ludicrous. Its as expected for both sides to deny.

The only logical response is that the sample was mishandled and therefore it ceases to be relevant.

But people will believe what they want.

I think this interesting:

In sports governed by the World Anti-Doping Code — the Olympic Games, for instance — the athlete would have to prove not only a breach of protocol, but that the breach caused the positive result. So under the rules of the Olympics of the Tour De France, etc., Braun would not have won his appeal.

How exactly was it mishandled again?

Truthfully, I'm not sure that there is much grey are a here.

What exactly is being disputed? It sounds like everyone agrees on what happened and the arbitrator made decision irrespective of what the agreement was.

In his press conference, Braun implied that the sample may have been tampered with, but he never disputed that when it counted during the hearing. It was sealed in his presence and the seals were intact when it got to the lab. That's the closest thing I've heard to a dispute and he only mentioned that after the fact (and even then it was specious).

I haven't really heard anyone argue about the actual facts of this case.

For the record, I'm not betting my life on him being a willful cheater...and I do sympathize with the fact that this should not have been made public. However, I don't like that he's been a disingenuous at times as well, and some people are eating it up.

MLB is saying that the rules WERE followed and the arbitrator threw it out anyway. If so, I can understand why they are upset. Why even have an agreement with the mlbpa if an arbitrator is going to make up his own standards in deciding the case?

It'll be interesting to see what the arbitrator's written report to everyone will be (hopefully that will be released too since Braun has waived his right to privacy about the hearing according to MLBPA http://www.jsonline.com/sports/brewers/140258083.html).

MLB has stated this was the established procedure and no one has disputed that from what I've read. The head of the USADA (responsible for USA Olympic testing) came on XM last Thursday and said this was S.O.P. for their samples collected on Saturdays. His point was that you'd rather have the collector in control of the sample for those two days than Kinkos.

I'm really not sure what's so shady about it. If you don't trust your collectors, you've got big problems. The samples are sealed in the subject's presence and those seals were no broken according to the lab that received them.

edit: according to this from wsj, Baseball's drug agreement states that "absent unusual circumstances, the specimens should be sent by FedEx to the laboratory on the same day they are collected." If that is really the only language covering this, that is potentially a HUGE loophole because there was simply no way to "send" the sample the day it was collected.

http://online.wsj.com/article/AP9f49857894144f3cb737e042c3c93e04.html

Thats our MLB!

MLB and the PA already screwed this issue up beyond repair, so I find this fairly meaningless. If the goal was to catch cheats and preserve "the integrity of the game" then they would have resolved this issue and agreed to a testing policy in the early or mid 90s like the NFL did.

Don Fehr's obsession with holding out on this issue turned out to be hugely detrimental to his constituency and it's costing several notable players their legacies, their HOF chances, and in some cases their post-playing careers.

At the end of the day, it seems pretty clear to me that if the rule/agreement says "you have to send the sample same day" and that wasn't done. So the screw up is on the hands of MLB, not the player. Just another example in the litany of ways in which the MLB office fails to do their job properly. They created this loophole, so they can't be pissed if someone walks through it. That's what happens when you have indecisive goof like Bud Selig running your league. Things get screwed up.

That's the entire history of the MLB and the MLBPA. It's why Marvin Miller isn't in the HOF still, even though he's the most significant non-player of the last 50 years of baseball history.