I cheered when baseball announced the aggressive testing for HGH that was part of the new collective bargaining agreement. While I don’t care if players took steroids and other performance enhancing drugs before the game banned the use of such substances, it is better for baseball if its brightest stars don’t operate under a cloud of suspicion and if they are not engaging in illegal behavior. While I love the long ball as much as any red-blooded American baseball fan, the current game is just as exciting for me as it ever was. That was why I was happy to read about the HGH testing policy. It looked as if this was the last step the game needed to take to put the entire steroids controversy into the past.
That was why this weekend’s revelation that Ryan Braun failed a test for performance enhancing drugs was so shocking for me. Braun was supposed to be one of the good guys. This kind of nonsense was supposed to be over. Instead, for a brief moment baseball was taken back to the recent past and the reigning NL MVP is now an accused juicer. Braun maintains his innocence and is appealing the test, but barring a miracle he can expect to miss fifty games next season.
There are no positives from baseball’s ongoing steroids saga. Innocent players are implicated due to guilt by association. Fans question the statistics compiled in the modern era. The media focuses on scandal instead of on-the-field performance. However, it is clear that baseball is willing to bear this burden to demonstrate that it is serious about ridding the game of these drugs. That is the only silver lining to this. One thing is clear. No star is to big or well respected. If you fail a drug test in MLB expect it to become public, regardless of who you are.
While that is certainly an important development, Braun’s failed test may hang over the sport for some time. No one suspected Braun in any way. His ability to go undetected this long raises serious questions about whether or not any testing regime is effective enough to enforce change. It also puts a shadow of doubt over all the game’s modern stars just at a time when the steroids era was fading away. For a while after this questions will remain about any breakout star or player who has thrived over the last few years. While the guilt by association won’t be as devastating as it was in the past, questions will remain. If Braun turned out to be on steroids then anyone can turn out to be using them. It is important to note that Braun maintains his innocence and is taking steps to fight this, but any successful appeal of the ban would be the first in the game’s history. If Braun gets his ban lifted I’ll be relieved and will happily post an apology on this site, but right now he looks guilty. So long as that kind of conclusion is based on perfectly sound logic the game will suffer.
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2 Responses to Ryan Braun’s failed test for PED’s shows MLB’s commitment to enforcement, but is a black eye for the game
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Mike, I share your concern over the impact this incident will have if the evidence ends up supporting the allegation. But right now it’s just an allegation, and not even an official one, since MLB has not announced it. What we know now is a result of information that was leaked to the media which, whether he ends up being guilty or not, is very unfair to both Ryan Braun and MLB.
We don’t conclusively know that he remained undetected for a long period of time. If he did take PEDs it could have been a one-time or short-term thing. In that case the testing regime was actually very effective irrespective of the timing which is unfortunate but can’t be blamed on the testing protocol.
The conclusion has to be based on actual evidence, not just logic, otherwise it just becomes a witch hunt. I think you should read Jay Jaffe’s take on this in BP (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15654) which provides some perspective on how little we actually know at this point and where the information is coming from.
You should also keep in mind the paradox of false positives. Once the actual incidence rate for something gets very low, the false positives may actually outnumber the true positives. As Jaffe points out, false positives from the carbon isotope test are very rare but the rate is not zero. Thus, if you run enough tests false positives are bound to show up. Jaffe also discusses why we shouldn’t interpret the record of MLB in drug testing appeals cases as meaning that anyone who has a positive test should be considered guilty beyond question. Apparently, the results of some tests have been overturned in the past without publicity because the results of the initial test were, rightly, not made public until there was no doubt. In this case, someone leaked the results to the media before the investigation was completed.
I’m giving Braun and the MLB testing program the benefit of the doubt until we know all of the facts and Braun has had an opportunity to properly defend himself.
I applaud the testing program. But I would be truly surprised if Braun is exonerated. As I wrote in the post, I’ll happily pen an apology on the site if his name is cleared, but he would be the first ever. I’ll plead guilty to charges of cynicism, but my gut for a while has been that all athletes in all sports take some form of illegal PEDs and that the illegal substances evolve faster than the enforcement regimes. So, this may be a case of confirmation bias on my part, but I can’t imagine ESPN would run this story if they weren’t confident it would stand up.