Arbitrator Who Ruled In Favor Of Ryan Braun Appeal Fired By MLB

So it took a couple of years, but Ryan Braun seems to have finally admitted that, yeah, he did cheat. And it’s going to cost him the remainder of this season, along with a pretty fair chunk of change. From MLB.com’s story (which covers the history of the whole sordid affair), here’s Braun’s statement:

This is good, except for that first sentence. Here’s me when I was eight years old:

There are a lot of baseball-related quotes that make me uncomfortable. For example, “The Angels are looking to move Vernon Wells” or “Jose Valverde is coming into the game” or “Yeah, she was just here, but I saw her leaving with Pat Burrell and a jar of pickled okra.” But here’s the most uncomfortable quote of the year so far, and it comes from Bob Nightengale of the USA Today:

They want (Ryan) Braun — badly. They have been relentless in their pursuit, trying to make life as miserable as possible for him.“They” is Major League Baseball. And now I’m picturing Bud Selig as Principal Rooney, climbing over fences and trespassing to prove that Ryan Braun is cutting class. I get it. Braun made MLB look bad last year, escaping punishment on a technicality. The last thing that baseball needed after the Mitchell Report was to look like a bunch of Keystone Cops, and a chain-of-custody slip-up did just that. The human response is for payback, comeuppance, and revenge.

Just when you thought it was safe to lionize Ryan Braun again, this has to happen?

Is any of this “evidence” exculpatory? Hardly. Actually, what’s the opposite of exculpatory? Because that’s what this seems like to me. When you see a list of baseball players, don’t you expect them to have something in common? I mean, aside from being baseball players? In the second instance, doesn’t “20-30K” seem like a lot of money for a bit of advice, as Braun now claims, about “about T/E [testosterone to epitestosterone] ratio and possibilities of tampering with samples”?

Unlike a player suspension, this firing cannot be appealed:

Given this firing, we might never find out what happened in the Braun case. Or perhaps Das would take this opportunity to make public his findings. It’s unlikely we’ve heard the last of this.

Hey, remember when Ryan Braun appealed his 50-game suspension and won the appeal, which had never happened before? And how the arbitrator’s written decision was eventually going to be released to the public?

Well, maybe not so much:

Presumably, Ryan Braun will once again be an outstanding player. And really soon, probably.

Anyway, here’s Tyler Kepner with an interesting note in the Times yesterday:

The Cubs might be closer to Ryan Braun’s controversial drug-testing case than they want to be if the Milwaukee slugger’s successful argument against baseball’s specimen-collector holds much weight.

Reed Johnson also talked to ESPN 1000, according to ESPNChicago:

Dino Laurenzi, the gentleman entrusted with shipping Ryan Braun’s urine from hither to thither, recently released a lengthy statement about his competence. It was a detailed account of how he saw the events.

That prompted David Cornwell, Braun’s attorney, to shoot off a statement of his own.

I was originally planning to try and set this up somehow, but after reading it over a few times, you know what? Nevermind. I’m just going to get out of the way and let Grantland be Grantland. Here’s Charles P. Pierce on the whole Ryan Braun situation. I have excerpted perhaps the most Grantland paragraph:

It makes you think about a lot more than you thought you’d be thinking about. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Pierce’s standpoint, you probably haven’t read any other article quite like this one.

When Ryan Braun defiantly addressed the media, he had several teammates in attendance for support. It seemed like unqualified support was the default position not only of his teammates, but of his union and all its members.

Not so, reports Buster Olney. In a piece for ESPN (Insider), Olney details the players who went off the record to tell him the decision stunk. And according to Olney, there are a lot more than you might have found a few years ago:

This, from SI.com’s Michael Rosenberg, is dead on point:

All those lovely things Braun said about his personal integrity and the way he’s lived his life and how he’s always apologized whenever he’s done anything wrong … Well, here’s a good chance to prove it.

After we heard about Ryan Braun’s successful appeal, and about the grounds for his successful appeal, it didn’t take long for someone to leak the name of his urine sample collector. That collector was the very experienced Dino Laurenzi, and Major League Baseball came to Laurenzi’s defense, saying he acted in a professional manner.

Now, Tuesday, Laurenzi has released a statement in response to Ryan Braun’s Friday press conference. You can read his statement here. Some excerpts:

Over the days since it was revealed that arbitrator Shyam Das was the deciding vote overturning Ryan Braun’s suspsension for an alleged positive test, many words have been written about this ruling, about Braun, and about the process.

Perhaps the most curious of all these pieces is one posted by Tommy Craggs at Deadspin, in which he claims that Das was concerned “about his own future”:

Ryan Braun won his appeal against a positive test and suspension, and last week held a press conference shortly after reporting to Brewers camp. During the press conference, Braun railed against a system he described as being “fatally flawed”. According to Braun, none of this should have ever happened in the first place, so according to Braun, the system screwed up.

Over at Yahoo!, Jeff Passan is curious:

Sports Illustrated’s Will Carroll appeared on WEEI yesterday and revealed that Braun’s defense was not simply about a breach in the chain-of-custody. According to his source, when the circumstances of the chain-of-custody were repeated by the defense, a second control sample tested similarly to Braun’s.

↵Listen to the segment here.

Here’s the good news: with the offseason behind us, it’s February, and we’re talking about Ryan Braun’s defense! Here’s the bad news: not that kind of defense.

In the middle of December, at ESPN, T.J. Quinn and Mark Fainaru-Wada broke the story that Ryan Braun had tested positive for a prohibited substance. Now, at the end of February, Quinn and Fainaru-Wada are back to address what’s going on. There are big questions, they say, and below please find some excerpts:

Since Ryan Braun was basically found not guilty of using a prohibited substance, a lot of focus has been placed on the chain-of-custody breakdown that allowed Braun to make a successful appeal. Ryan Braun submitted a urine sample, but then that urine sample wasn’t immediately sent in to be tested, and this seems to have caused sufficient doubt in the arbitrator’s mind as to rule in Braun’s favor.

Well, the person who took and handled Braun’s sample has a name, it turns out, and according to Major League Baseball, he didn’t do anything wrong. Jeff Passan:

”Major League Baseball runs the highest quality drug testing program of any professional sports organization in the world. It is a joint program, administered by an independent program administrator selected by the Commissioner’s Office and the MLBPA.The “professional” qualifier is in there because no one messes with the Olympics. They know if you lingered over a perfume ad too long while reading Cosmopolitan.

”With regards to the breach of confidentiality regarding this case, both the Commissioner’s Office and the MLBPA have investigated the original leak of Ryan Braun’s test, and we are convinced that the leak did not come from the Commissioner’s Office.It’s hard to know how many people could have leaked the story, and I believe MLB when they say they’ve investigated. Not sure how easy it would have been to find the culprit.

Thursday, Ryan Braun found out that his appeal of a potential suspension was successful. Friday, Braun reported to Brewers camp and then held a press conference where he finally got to address everything that’s happened in front of the media. Tom Haudricourt more or less provides a transcript, and if you have a little time, it’s worth reading through. Some people might find Braun’s words more convincing than others, but I don’t think anybody could find Braun’s words unconvincing.

A sample:

In the last 24 hours, there have been some suggestions that the Ryan Braun Affair suggests, perhaps even proves, that Major League Baseball’s drug policy isn’t working. That it’s broken, even.

I would suggest the opposite. I would suggest that we’ve seen in the last 24 hours suggests that Major League Baseball’s drug policy is working nearly as well as it can work.

Thursday, we learned that Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun had become the first player to win an appeal of a failed drug test, which meant he would not be suspended for the first 50 games of the 2012 season.

Friday, Braun spoke to the media in a press conference televised live by Major League Baseball Network.

One of the more concise and salient points in the Ryan Braun argle-bargle (or foofaraw) comes from Jeff Fletcher, who takes us into a hypothetical world in which we know that Braun is completely clean. False positives aren’t that rare, so it is possible. What would happen if a completely clean player failed a test?

Braun’s only defense is to challenge the accuracy of the test, whether he is totally innocent or whether he’s guilty and looking for an out. Doesn’t matter. His only defense is to challenge the accuracy of the test.You’ll read a lot about technicalities and red tape, but this is one of the most important points to keep in mind. There’s a reason for the appeals process.

During the Cold War, you had your communists, your anti-communists, and your anti-anti-communists. The anti-anti-communists had no love for the Soviet Union, they averred, but kept their powder dry for the real enemy: the anti-communists here at home.

I am an anti-anti-steroidist. All things being equal, I would rather ballplayers not use anabolic steroids. But I can’t make myself get worked up over those who did. A rule unenforced is no rule at all. And in the face of so much faux-indignation and Won’t someone please think of the children! from the anti-steroidists, how can I be mad at Mark McGwire? Wait, did he use steroids, or was it that creatine stuff? See? I don’t even care enough to know.

Shyam Das is an independent arbitrator who was appointed jointly by the players’ union and Major League Baseball. He issued a decision on the Ryan Braun case. You can get fancy when you explain the decision -- “chain of custody”, and all that -- or you could explain that a vial of Braun’s urine hung out at a courier’s house for a weekend. Das made his decision based on that. Glad that’s ov …

Wait a sec. It’s not over. Not at all. Even though the jointly appointed arbitrator issued a ruling based on the language of a joint agreement, Major League Baseball still feels wronged. Or something. So they’re thinking this isn’t over. From ESPN.com:

Major League Baseball was never in a good spot with this Ryan Braun mess. After they spent the better part of the last decade trying to distance themselves from performance-enhancing drugs, the National League MVP up and failed a test for performance-enhancing drugs. We were never supposed to know, but a guy knew a guy who knew a guy at ESPN, and things got weird after that.

It was such a weird spot for MLB, in fact, that Ken Rosenthal wrote that some felt a suspension of Braun might be the best-case scenario for Bud Selig once the news leaked.