Braun case has no winners

Normally, in these cases, the line of demarcation is easy to predict: local versus national.

Inside the cocoon of the true believers – as we have seen in San Francisco with Barry Bonds and at Penn State with Jerry Sandusky – it’s “our guys can do no wrong, and if they do, we don’t want to know.”

Outside, in the real world as we like to think of it, the evidence is viewed more critically.

It’s quite telling, then, that in the disturbing case of Ryan Braun, the National League MVP of the Milwaukee Brewers who appealed a positive drug test and won – the first ballplayer ever to have a banned-substance suspension overturned, as far as anyone knows – opinion is divided along different lines altogether.

Not Milwaukee versus the world, although an element of that exists (largely because the Brewers are the team baseball commissioner Bud Selig used to own). Not even Braun defenders versus Braun skeptics, though the argument always ends up there.

More like “he got off on a technicality” versus “Major League Baseball deserves this.” Both of which are true.

Braun didn’t get his suspension reversed because the test results were wrong, he got off because they were ruled inadmissible, and because baseball broke the faith, and because it has a lousy arbitration system.

His bacon was saved, in the main, by the fact that the courier whose responsibility was to maintain a secure chain of custody of the player’s urine sample from collection to shipment screwed up.

Figuring he couldn’t find an open Fedex outlet on a Saturday night, he instead reportedly took the sample home and “stuck it in the fridge between half-eaten cans of dog food and leftover kung pao chicken,” as Gwen Knapp so eloquently lampooned the operation in the San Francisco Chronicle.

It was only on the Monday that he got around to taking it to the Fedex drop-off location, and though no seals had been broken and there is no suggestion that the sample was in any way compromised before reaching the World Anti-doping Agency-approved testing lab in Montreal, the chain-of-custody error alone was enough to spoil the case.

The three-man arbitration panel split 2-1 in Braun’s favour with, predictably, MLB’S representative voting to uphold the suspension, the player union’s rep voting against, and the only independent on the panel, Shyam Das, breaking the tie.

The arbitration system is as flawed as the rest of it, because you just know the vote is 1-1, along strict party lines, before the evidence has even been presented, so only the independent guy is actually ruling on the facts. Das’s judgment, as it would be in many a court of law, was that the evidence was inadmissible because the prosecution didn’t follow the rules – its own rules, the ones it agreed to jointly with the players’ association in setting up the drug-testing program.

So, Ryan Braun is innocent? Not exactly. So he’s guilty? Um, that hasn’t been established, either.

His sentence has simply been reduced from 50 games of inactivity to an indeterminate period of skepticism. Maybe, like Bonds and Mark Mcgwire and Sammy Sosa and Roger Clemens and all the others, a life sentence on that count.

The Braun camp is proclaiming vindication, Milwaukee fans are delighted, and defence lawyers everywhere are high-fiving over one more loophole to exploit the next time the evidence against their clients looks bad.

“It is the first step in restoring my good name and reputation,” Braun said in a prepared statement. “We were able to get through this because I am innocent.”

The other side, which has heard every conceivable excuse from doping athletes as to how that substance got into their urine in the first place – spiked sarsaparilla, excessive sex, mislabelled nutritional supplements, steroid-tainted meat, hair-growing potions – is livid at the courier, and now discouraged over the failure of the testing system.

And both sides are outraged at MLB’S inept handling of the original test results, which were supposed to be confidential but were leaked to ESPN.

If the confidentiality clause hadn’t been broken, the idea is that no one ever would have known about this, at all.

The case would never have gotten far enough for MLB to jump the gun with its announcement of a 50-game suspension, because it would have been thrown out behind closed doors.

In theory, we never would have known that Ryan Braun had elevated levels of synthetic testosterone in his body.

Two things we do know for sure: one is that getting beat on a technicality is bad for the war on doping, bad for the public’s confidence in the system, bad for WADA, which handles the testing for most of the sporting world, bad for sport.

And the second thing? North American testing henceforth will take place during regular shipping hours. There’s no pee in weekend.