One of the least surprising things is that baseball players are still using performance enhancing drugs. What is surprising is that they are still getting caught. The latest dummy to get caught is Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun. He doesn’t look like a dummy. He doesn’t seem to be a dummy. (He also doesn’t look like a guy who should be hitting 30 homers a year, but I’m sure it’s just because he “puts a lot of backspin on the ball.”)
So why would he cheat?
That’s not the right question. Players cheat, and use PEDs to do it because those drugs work.
The right question is how did he get caught?
He got caught because he got tested during the playoffs last year. And he clearly thought he’d already been tested for the last time in 2011. He’s doing what every athlete who has ever tested positive has done. He’s declared himself innocent. He’s busy trying to get the people in the media he’s friendly with to take up his side. He’s pointing to the fact that when he was re-tested days later that one came up normal. But all that proves is that by then he’d pissed out the traces of the substance he originally got caught with.
Several years ago I used to help an athletic trainer friend of mine conduct tests of Olympic and pre-Olympic athletes for the United States Anti Doping Association (USADA). One of the big misnomers is that you can tell what athletes are cheating, based on what they look like. Not all cheaters look like East German women’s swimmers with one eyebrow and mustaches. Because the blatant cheaters of the mid-to late ’90s were so cartoonish in appearance (Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, etc.) some fans think that when you look at a wiry guy like Braun that there’s no way he cheated. But athletes cheat for different reasons, and to achieve different goals. Not everybody wants to look like Bruce Banner after he found out somebody pissed in the coffee.
Braun will whine and cry and some people will believe him. I’m sure he has some hope that the biggest Brewers fan in the world can use his power to step in and help him beat the rap:
And by the way, a Google image search for Bud Selig is one of the best things ever. What a hapless dolt.
If he does, it’ll be a travesty. The baseball drug testing program is a joke, one that catches only the dumb. Braun got caught, and if it shames the league because he’s the reigning MVP…so be it. Letting him off the hook, against all common sense, would be worse.
You got caught, Ryan. Stop acting the like the preening, metrosexual jackass that you are, and accept it. Given your haircut, I would have pegged you as somebody to have a fourth the normal level of testosterone, not four times.
