Ryan Braun Fails a Drug Test

The big news from late last week was that Ryan Braun – - winner of the NL MVP Award last year – - failed a drug test. According to reports, that drug test was administered sometime during last year’s NL Playoffs. If that failed test is upheld during an appeal process before a baseball arbitrator, Braun faces a 50-game suspension starting next season. Braun professes innocence in this matter and the arbitrator will make a final determination on that claim sometime before Spring Training begins. Reports say that Braun did not test positive for steroids or the metabolic by-products of steroids; rather he tested positive for synthetic testosterone. [More specifically, reports said that the test showed an elevated ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone.] The message that I take from this is that this test failure is something more than testing positive for a masking agent. If you recall, Manny Ramirez tested positive for a substance that can mask certain PED’s in the blood but ...