Braun wins appeal

Couldn't Braun have a very valid suit under HIPAA Privacy law? I'm guessing that when he addresses the press today Braun says that his lawyers are contemplating his legal options to sue and therefore cannot comment much.

 

Again: All of your information is from a bunch of leaking bastards with an agenda. I don't know which way is up at this point. It's a joke.

 

I'm still very interested in how the testosterone levels could be three or four times higher than any test ever before. That, to me, tells me something very easily could have been screwed up wit the test itself.

 

There are very specific protocols for what can cause an appeal to be upheld, with chain-of-custody being the big one. The arbitrator upheld the appeal because the chain-of-custody rules weren't followed to the letter. He was supposed to FedEx as soon as possible, and he didn't.

Even if Braun's team was able to show that the elevated T-levels were problematic, they still haven't explained away the presence of synthetic testosterone.

 

While it's true that it comes from leaking bastards with an agenda, what in their agenda would cause them to lie?

Braun has very good reason to leak false information. What does MLB gain by trashing the reputation of their MVP?

 

Grand jury testimony. Giambi and Sheffield, if I remember correctly.

 

At this point? Putting their own reputation above his.

The sample was tainted. Period. But some people are so desperate to assume everybody is dirty that they just don't care.

 

When someone shows me the science that would cause the false positive, I'll believe that the sample was tainted and that caused the false positive.

 

1. The drug-testing process is contained in baseball's Joint Drug Agreement. You can read it.
2. The folks handling the program are experts but even they're human and fail sometimes, as this handler apparently did.
3. MLB conducts more tests annually than USADA and, fyi, any company contracted to handle the mechanics of testing, whether it's USADA or a different company, has nothing to do with the "transparency" testing.
4. Leaks have nothing to do with transparency, either, just more human failing.
5. The Olympics test a far smaller percentage of its athletes and has more than its share of controversies, so how exactly would that help?

Baseball's program works. The difference in this case is that you have a front-end leak of confidential information and a back-end leak that revealed that a human mistake was apparently made in the handling of a sample and among the reasons the suspension was overturned. It was a bad test. It will likely lead to the increased scrutiny of procedures for handling samples, which by the way are no different than the procedures used by the Olympics.

 

A few things from reading this entire fascinating, if at times snarky, thread:

I've read all the news stories I can find on this and don't recall anyone stating that the guy who collected the sample kept it refrigerated. I've read a lot of posts with "cuz the guy kept it in his fridge for a few hours" in them. I don't know if that would matter or not but I do think we should consider: The guy's job was to administer and mail the test in accordance with what seem like pretty clear rules on when and how to send them. He wasn't smart enough to follow these simple procedures. Does it seem reasonable to assume he would be smart enough or devoted enough to refrigerate the sample?

It's possible I've watched way too many episodes of Alias, La Femme Nikita and Mission Impossible, but I don't think it's such a far-fetched idea that someone could have tampered with the test.

Someone called the 2-1 vote a sham because the arbitrator will always be the one to make the call. It's set up like that. MLB has a rep and MLBPA has a rep. They will probably disagree on every case. That's why you have an abritrator.

I would hope that every sports editor who still has a reporter to assign to stories like this, would be putting someone on a bio of Shyam Das today (or, better, last night). And wouldn't it make sense to talk with doctors about what someone could have taken that would cause such a dramatically high test result?

Maybe it goes without saying, but this is another item on a long list of reasons why Bud Selig has no business being commissioner of baseball. His people can't properly administer drug tests and can't keep from leaking things that by agreement are supposed to be confidential. By leaking this story about Braun before the appeals process was complete it 1.) tarnished a guy's image without legitimate proof (they have tainted proof, not legitimate proof), 2.) managed to get everyone talking about how MLB players are all a bunch of cheaters right as spring training starts and 3.) opened MLB to a huge lawsuit.

If I hear another person saying Braun is the first player to successfully overturn a test, I'm going to scream. These tests are supposed to be confidential. We don't know if he's the first. He's the first we are aware of, but there could theoretically be dozens of others that we don't know about.

 

Same question I have, and it still hasn't really been answered.

I could care less about the drug tests and the synthetic testoterone, and just don't understand why others are so apoplectic about it.

For god's sake, I lived through Brady Anderson. Nothing's going to make me raise an eyebrow after that.

 

That's an awfully prejudicial way to say he was wrong about whether FedEx was taking packages late on a Saturday night.