So that is at least twice the MLB screwed up here, and we are really angry at the player? Agreed upon procedures aren’t optional things. You can’t just leave a player’s urine in a refrigerator in some random apartment for a weekend. Steroid tests are far from infallible even if everything is done perfectly right, and when not done correctly they are worthless. Craig Calcaterra puts it a bit more bluntly.
I for one will be rooting for Braun to do well. He is a fun player on a fun team. Maybe he used something he shouldn’t have, but because mlb still doesn’t take its role in drug prevention seriously, we may never know for sure. Players agreed to give up some privacy rights under certain conditions, and the mlb has failed to live up to their end of the bargain.
The evidence says he did, but if you’re Braun, why discuss the evidence when you can argue about the closing time of the local FedEx branch? From what I can see, the issue is not that the guy kept the sample in his fridge over the weekend. That’s allowed. The issue is that he could’ve gotten it to the FedEx sooner but didn’t because he thought the branch was already closed and it wasn’t, so he didn’t get the sample in the mail “as soon as possible.” The rules exist for a reason, but that’s not exactly overwhelming evidence of a screwup that compromises the integrity of the process.
It is possible to both insist on proper safeguards and protocols, on the one hand, and also the be pretty damn sure that the guy was guilty, on the other.
If a suspected murderer gets released because the cops failed to obtain a warrant and therefore conducted an illegal search, then i will blame the cops, and will support the decision to free the suspect. As Calcaterra notes, such safeguards are in place for a reason.
But if that illegal search discovered a knife with the victims blood and the suspect’s fingerprints all over it, then i would still feel pretty comfortable calling the guy a murderer, even if he didn’t end up in prison.
Similarly, in this case, i tend to agree that the failure to follow protocol means that the decision to overturn the suspension was the right one. But i still believe that, based on the preponderance of the evidence, Braun used a banned substance.
Hogwash. Delaying the delivery of the sample can result in a false-positive, and that’s a repeatable fact of science. Calling it a “technicality” is simply wrong. Early leaks are saying that the arbitration panel was shown how a false negative results when a sample is compromised in the way that the Braun sample was.
Where are you hearing these early leaks? My understanding was that 1. “compromised” is not an applicable term here, since it’s a procedural problem, and that 2. Braun’s A sample showed an exogenous source of testosterone. Where would the synthetic testosterone have come from, considering that the defect was related to waiting a day to go to Fed Ex?
I’m trying to figure that out as well. Sorry for the shoddy info. Will Carroll’s twitter feed is pretty adamant about the science being there, but he seems to be on vacation and hasn’t posted a full article - which would be very helpful in figuring out how a synthetic testosterone reading would appear.
Will Carroll is also the guy who announced that Pete Rose had been reinstated by Major League Baseball and would be the Reds’ manager in 2004… and who still has not backed down from the story.
Ah, OK, thanks. I just read through his twitter now. His information isn’t public, dot dot dot, he says. On the face of it, it seems like either he’s got it wrong or literally everyone else does.
He says a bunch of times that they scientifically proved that what MLB did with Braun’s sample will repeatedly produce a positive result. But from what I can tell, what they did with the sample only deviated from SOP in that the guy was wrong about Fed Ex being closed. If he really couldn’t have shipped it that day, it’s the accepted practice (and sometimes happens) that he sticks it in a refrigerator, ships it later, and they test it. They don’t just throw it out.
So if Carroll’s right about the reason for the decision, it seems like Braun’s lawyer actually proved that the whole testing process is unreliable. He could have made the same argument, that it leads to positive results every time, without the chain of custody violation, unless Fed Ex is never closed.
A rather absurd technicality. MLB has a disturbing problem with confidentiality and the union has a legitimate beef. Braun deserved to “win” for that reason alone. Since it will never be adequately explained, I wish it was never leaked in the first place.
I would like to see more on this as apparently plenty of samples have been taken on a Saturday and not sent out until Monday morning which would tend to keep me thinking he got off on a technicality.
I’m keeping my eyes peeled, What Exit? - but it looks like no one wants to run Carroll’s article, which is pretty telling. Still looks like there’s a lot to this story that isn’t making the light of day, so I’m not going to jump to anymore conclusions (on either side of the issue).
Got a response from Carroll on Twitter. Doesn’t seem to look like he believes the leak when they claim there was synthetic testosterone. I’m still not sure why Braun’s defense would focus on a breach of procedure if a scientific argument would be conclusive.
I either saw or thought I saw reports that the Braun sample was stored in a refridgerator, but I don’t think that was the case. ESPN says the sample was kept “in a cool place” in a Tupperware container on a desk. There’s no argument that the sample was tampered with since it was sealed several times.
Like I said earlier, I’m open to someone showing me how time and a lack of refrigeration (or not) could have caused a 20-to-1 skewing in the relevant testosterone rations in the sample. At the moment I’m not expecting to see that, though.
The only place the 20:1 ratio information came from is the leak, who is most likely an MLB person.
It’s incredibly easy to alter your testosterone/estrogen reading by just slapping a bunch of estrogen patches on, so if Braun *was *juicing, he’d have covered his ass.
Very vague info out there about estrogen breaking down much faster than testosterone, thus artificially raising the reading.
Either way, there’s plenty of reason to give Braun the benefit of the doubt. There’s a reason there’s a closed-door policy on this entire process. In this case, the process very well may have worked, but the leaking that took place really poisoned the well of public opinion.
According to Braun, his test results were something like 3 times higher than the highest test results in the history of the program. That is either extremely damning, or shows something went very wrong.
Let’s also keep Baye’s theorem in mind. Suppose the test gets it right 99% of the time, and 1% of players actually use PEDs. Then statistically, half of all positive results will be false positives.