pebadger

Why do I feel certain that somebody, somehwere is actually checking to see if this is true?

Not to drag the thread off track or anything, but it's going to be a weird year in terms of adjusting to all the change in the division from a fan perspective. It'll still be easy not to like the Cards for reasons too numerous to count, and I've never much liked the Reds either, but it should be fun finding new reasons not to like the divisional opponents.

The funny thing about the Landis T/E result is that the lab botched it so badly that the arbitration panel threw out the result as unreliable. Then they convicted him anyway because a lab that couldn't correctly do a T/E test could be trusted to do GC/IRMS instead.

Exactly. There is no degredation of the sample. The unsaid qualifier being "to the extent we looked for it".

It's a very nice article written from the perspective of someone who heeds the line "Trust us, we're experts" without further inquiry. Again, I'm not down on the science/technology. I'm just willing to question it when someone disputes it and there is a basis for that dispute.

xisxisxis: Something on just that point here: http://willcarroll.tumblr.com/post/18370038790/why-victor-contes-idea-doesnt-work

The key point about the whole "delay" issue: As we all know, certain things in life are time-sensitve. Others are not. You literally can keep certain foods on a shelf for years with no changes to thier usefulness as food, other things go bad in hours. This isn't news to anyone. Braun's people never claimed that delay alone was an issue. Delay isn't necessarily an issue in an of itself. The issue is all the other things that might possibly happen during the delay. If you leave something non-perishable on a shelf it CAN remain fine for years. But, if during those years the non-perishable item is in a room that floods to the ceiling or in which a fire breaks out, that food item may no longer be good. Nobody would say that time alone made the thing go bad, but storage time clearly was a factor in determining the final outcome for that item. The longer something sits, the more time there is or something to happen to it. That isn't rocket science. People opposed to Braun's side are making it seem as if Braun's people are just being stupid. They're not. Edit: more thoughts on this point. They underlying assumption of the whole "technicality" argument is that Braun and his sneaky lawyers somehow put one over on poor old gullible Das. That just doesn't fly when you look at Das' credentials. The easiest way to lose a case of this nature is to just go in and throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see if it sticks. You don't go in and blame it on the burritos or aliens or whatever. You build a coherent case that supports your position, using the facts at hand. The science on the other side is just too powerful to overcome unless you make a really strong argument. The idea that this all came down to a few unsupported hopeful arguments on Braun's part, and that smart people who understand how things really work would beleive that Das just said "Yeah sure, that's a good one I hadn't heard before", seems to me to be a more ludicrous stance than is skepticism about MLB's case.

Yes, it's pretty much the central premise of the piece he Carroll has at Amazon. Again, don't want to run afoul of copyright, but I think one quote isn't going to hurt. The article costs 99 cents and Carroll's share goes to the Jimmy V Fund for cancer research. Go out and buy it. "While the problem in the chain of custody is bad enough in and of itself, it is the result of that problem that led to the positive. According to sources with knowledge of Braun's defense, the team was able to recreate the results." Nobody is picking this up because they don't have the sources that Carroll does. Nobody wanted to buy the piece and they aren't going to use it now and have to attribute it to him, especially when they are pursuing an different editorial slant on the story. When the written decision is inevitably leaked, we'll maybe be able to find out more.

The following is an excerpt from a blog post pertaining to various information and issues which became public as a result of the open arbitration hearing with respect to the Floyd Landis Tour de France controversy. I post it in support of the following contention: This is a system that is set up to "catch cheats". It is not a system especially interested in what the average person on the street in the United States would understand as due process or an exercise interested in deeply delving into concepts of "truth". "WADA funded labs and scientists prohibited from helping athletes Of the most interest to the behind the scenes politics and procedures of WADA and their iron fist rule of no dissent came out during the cross examination of USADA witness Dr. Don Catlin, who until very recently was the head of the WADA accredited lab at UCLA and is a world-renowned doping expert. No longer being responsible for a WADA certified, he seemed to be very egger to speak his mind freely and apparently laced some of his testimony with sarcasm aimed at WADA. The following is part of an exchange about what it takes to maintain a WADA accreditation: Q: anything else to keep accred. A: goes on and on; file reports, do research, not doing certain things, and get a "good citizen" to WADA world of labs. Q: what is a good citizen? A: participate, and not testify against your neighbor. Q: in order to maintain your accreditation, you may not testify against other labs? A: it's very clear it is not permitted to testify against other labs. Q: are you familiar with the laboratory code of ethics? A: yes, I wrote it. Q: how opportune. A: the first version. Q: Annex B, ISL, Code of ethics, 3.4 page 55. A: yes Q: i'm going to highlight sections. "the lab should not provide testing services in defense of an athlete", did you write that? A: no, it seemed to have changed. Q: [Conduct detrimental] that would cast doubt. A: i do. Q: is this a description of being a good citizen. A: yes. In another part of the cross examination Dr. Catlin disclosed how WADA had expressed displeasure with some of his testimony: Q: you testified you received grief for testifying on the zack lund case? A: yes. Q: what was the source? A: I don't think WADA was very happy. Q: Olivier Rabin. A: I don't think he was very happy. Q: did he contact you before the hearing. A: no, he was there, and they spoke to me. Q: what did they say. A: before the case started, it was made clear to me it was not a good idea for me to do this. Q: who is Olivier Rabin? A: Scientific director of WADA. Q: review the facts of the case, you were called by USADA, it involved finestra, before Torino games. A: yes. Q: there was a debate whether finestra was a masking agent. A: yes. Q: you testimony is that is was not. A: yeah. Q: which was against WADA's placement of it on the banned list. A: yes. In another exchange under direct questioning by a USADA lawyer, Dr. Catlin gave some answers that bring into question just what constitutes a positive result: Q: in your opinion, do you need more than one metabolite with that kind of delta to call it positive? A: no. Q: if the sample had been analyzed at UCLA, and gotten these results, would you report a positive. A: positive with side letter to client (USADA) that the sample is positive to the WADA criteria, but that we have written a letter that our published criteria would call it a negative. Keep in mind that this piece of testimony came under direct questioning by USADA, not cross examination by Landis's lawyers. What truly constitutes a positive result? What does the science say? Why does a WADA accredited lab feel it necessary to state that under their published criteria what WADA would declare as a positive they would classify as a negative. Could it really be that WADA's standards are so strict that truly innocent athletes are testing positive and being convicted as drug cheats?" The entire post is worth reading here: http://blog.environmentalchemistry.com/2007/05/when-science-peer-review-independent.html. Of special interest is the part on the nature of "peer reviewed" science in this little corner of the world. Note that this isn't some sports-obsessed blog or a cycling fansite. It's a science blog, wondering just how the drug-testing railroad is being run.

My questions for people who have trouble believeing Braun. I ask these questions not to invalidate the opinion that Bruan may have done something, but to perhaps provide a different perspective in terms of how people think about the entire issue. 1) Why does Braun have to explain the test result is wrong? Why shoudn't MLB have to prove that it's right? 2) What evidence, other than a single disputed test result, leads you to believe that Bruan took a banned substance for the purpose of improving his performance on the baseball field? 3) Why should MLB's standard of viewing these cases through the narrow window of strict liability constrain people from taking a broader view of the case from their own perspective? Shouldn't people be allowed to make their own determinations on the case based on factors that are logically relevant to the issue, regardless of whether the are relevant only for the narrow purposes of the drug-testing system? 4) If you knew that the people who work for WADA labs are disallowed by WADA rules from assisting an athlete who has been accused of doping, through testimony or otherwise, would you be more or less willing to trust the experts from WADA? In other words, does the fact WADA will allow people with intimate knowledge of drug-testing only to use that knowledge when it is used to "convict", and that you will never hear a WADA-affiliated person publicly admit error with respect to any drug-testing case, bother you at all? We will never know for certain what did or didn't happen with this particular case. What we do know for certain is that this case presents the public with yet another opportunity to learn more about how a lot of things work in the world, and maybe even make improvements The only question is whether we will embrace the opportunity.

We live in an age of unprecedented access to just about any kind of information that you'd want to find about just about any subject you want to learn something about. We also live in an age where people who choose not to do that have unprecedented access to the means of broadcasting their opinions to audiences of immense size. We'd rather pay people to do the second than do both.

My first thought was science consultant, too, dhoff. That's exactly the place I'd cultivate a source if I were a writer working drug stories like Fainaru-Wada does. Further agree that no attorney with enough of a reputation of excellence to even be consulted in a case like this would likely jeopardize their entire practice by getting involved in playing games like this. (I'm no longer practicing, but I have a law degree as well). One thing that bothers me is that it's pretty well-established by multiple sources who used to work at ESPN that that network has a policy of not running stuff unless they have two, independant sources for a story. Did ESPN just simply disregard that principle for this case? Or were there two leaks? Given the journalistic mess that ESPN has become, I'm guessing they just went with the story based on the source and F-W's reputation (ESPN spent a lot of money to hire him on exactly to break stories like this). The other possibility is that there wasn't another leak per se, but that they somehow maneuvered somebody into unwittingly providing enough corroboration of the initial leak to provide them with justification for running with the story.

Being a Brewer fan and a baseball fan, I want to find every reason to believe Braun is telling the truth. Right now, what I'm pinning my beliefs on is the fact that the T levels were 3 times any previous result, or the 20:1 ratio. Having said that, Pebadger, if I'm understanding your explaination about about how synthetic T could be detected in the Urine sample it seems to me that it would be very easy to poke holes in that argument. My understanding is that as a standard procedure after a positive test for PEDs, they tested the sample again and came up with the same results. So, MLB does thousands of tests a year, as far as we know they have never had a false positive before for sythetic T, yet now, what you are describing above happened twice on the same player? Please let me know if I'm not understanding something completely, but if I'm being completely objective, this seems a bit far fetched. If there is some substance in Braun's urine that, when subjected to the test, is going to "look like synthetic T" the first time they test the sample, it will look like synthetic T every time they test that sample if they don't take steps to differentiate between the things they are looking for. As nobody has any idea what that other substance might be, or even that they should be looking for something else in the first place, how would they ever do that? Another note on false positives that can't be reiterated enough: we don't know that there have never been false positives. By their very nature, you don't know when you have a false positive unless information you gain from other sources invalidates a positive that you have no other reason to suspect is invalid. When somebody goes in and gets tested for a certain disease, and the test result indicates the presence of that disease, we follow up on that case and will subsequently learn, by future tests or in the course of treatment, whether or not that person really has the disease. Nothing like that happens in drug testing. They run a test on one sample, taken on a given day. The testers don't look for explanations for their results, they just look for results. They aren't looking to hurt people, but they aren't looking to help people either. If their recipe says "Guilty", to them that's the indisputable end of the case. If the subject of the test says "That can't be right" the immediate assumption and 100% legal presumption to the testing system) is that the subject is a filthy liar as well as a cheat. I don't want to say garbage-in, garbage-out, but that's kind of the case. You can only differentiate between substances if your're looking for them specifically. MLB is looking only for ONE thing specifically, and when they think they've found it, that's the end of the case on their end. Since they run the test the same way every time, they should get the same result every time. If so, that means they did a great job running the test. It doesn't mean that the result is correct.

Yup. I'd be shocked as well, but even if they didn't, or if it's faulty/badly drafted, there should still be a number of causes of action they could pursue other than violation of an explicit agreement. The biggest problem now is likely just nailing down the specific proof of the case. As should be clear to most, everyone in the MLB/MLBPA/Braun camps "knowing" who the leak is isn't exactly the same as being able to prove it.

If it is a friend (or former friend) that would be pretty awful. If it's a lawyer, sanctions would certainly be on the table from various professional organizations. If it's some sort of consultant (PR, science, etc.), I'd make it my personal mission in life to make sure that that information came out and that the person's business was destroyed. That person's business liability carrier would settle their end of the case before you even filed it. I'd be stunned if it was a principal in any of the law firms or other consultantcy businesses who actually spilled the beans, but it's not out of the realm of possibility and maybe even likely in this particular case if I'm reading between the lines correctly. Most leaks are the result of some sort of information security breakdown which takes sensitive information and somehow lands it in the hands of someone with little to lose by leaking.

Here's an idea. It would at least double the costs of the program, but if people on both sides are really serious about this stuff, and given the funds available to both sides, that shouldn't matter. 1) On the day samples are collected, the player's sample is divided into two parts. Separate couriers each take one sample and deliver it for transport with separate shippers. The courier will hold sealed instructions from MLB, to be opened by the shipping company, detailing where the package is to be delivered (one of two or more labs). 2) Each lab upon receiving the sample will run the required test. They will, in turn, send out two sets of the results packet to a clearinghouse run by an party independant of MLB and MLBPA. These results will be sealed, but identifiable by number. The clearinghouse will hold one of each of the result packets. One of the packets, chosen at random, will be sent from the clearinghouse to MLB, the other to MLBPA. 3) If MLB contacts MLBPA and says they have a postive, MLBPA can either confirm that their corresponding packet also indicates a positive, or they can dispute the positive by revealing a differing result on the same sample from a different lab. The existence of the dispute can be verified by the copies of the packet still in the possession of the clearinghouse. MLBPA will never open their packet unless a positive is alleged by MLB, and then it will open it only in the presence of he player and/or his representatives. You could probably set up the coding system so that the player actually being accused would be known only to MLBPA (and verifiable by the clearinghouse as necessary) and only released to MLB upon confirmation that the results of the tests match. In this way, leaks of names would not be possible, except from MLBPA, unless BOTH results are positives. 4) A player will still have the right to appeal a suspension under this program, but it probably gets a whole lot tougher to do practically. The parties would have to negotiate what happens when you get conflicting results. I'd say the whole episode just goes away, but they're free to negotiate how that works. 5) If the testing program is truly rigourous and reliable, this system should prove it and increase confidence in the system. In instances where there are problems, you might actually be able to learn from the problems because you'll have two sets of independant test data to work with. In cases like the Bruan case, even if you have an irregularity on one test with something like transportation delays, you might be able to rule out the possibility that the delay caused any problem if the results come back the same despite the delay with one sample. Not that hard to do, other than cost.

The "no bacterial growth" line is legitimate in that it HAS to be legitimate. If they find that there is bacterial contaminaton, they don't run the test. MLB can spout a whole bunch of lines about doing all sorts of things that support the idea that the sample was fine. IF they couldn't rattle off those things, the test never would have been done. What they can't say for certain is that simply because they ruled out a bunch of things that might be wrong, they simply can't rule out every possible thing that might be wrong. And they hate being in that position, for the same reason that athletes being in that position as a matter of course when it comes to these things; when you have to prove a logical negative, you're in a pretty impossible place. MLB is basically saying that they followed the recipe to get a good result and so their result is good and that we should just take their word for it. They just want us to ignore the part of procedure that they didn't follow, because even though it's a rule, it's a rule that doesn't matter according to them. I wonder what would happen if an athlete broke one of the rules dealing with pre-testing procedures, like not showin up at an appointed hour, which is the treated as a "failed" test. Would anyone buy the argument that he should win the case anyway because the rule he broke didn't really matter?

You're welcome. Spent too much time learning about different things not to share it. Go out and evangelize my brother! In all seriousness, I hope I'm not coming across as a know-it-all, because I certainly don't. I'm certainly open to being challenged, clarified or proven wrong. I have some strong opinions about this case and about certain drug-testing issues in general, but probably not as strong in a pro-athlete vein as they might appear sometimes in these posts. I'm trying hard to separate my opinions from stuff that is fact. I'm pro-Braun in this thing obvioiusly, but I could just as easily be anti-Braun if my own internal detector pointed in that direction. It might still shift in that direction if enough evidence were to come out that supported MLB's case. My initial involvement in the thread was motivated by a desire to show that these cases, when honestly disputed, are never as simple as they seem, and then to show why that is the case. I've just been happy to be a part of the bf.net community which has taken a very inflammatory topic on which many of us have very different opinions and steered the discussion in directions beneficial for us all. The fact that the great moderators of this site have rarely had to step in on these threads is something bf.net should be proud of. Now where the heck is the Roenicke complaint thread?

Good post JCrew. Sums it up well in that amount of space. I should note, and I think this comes across in your post as well, that the science/technology underpinning all of this is brilliant, fascinating and well-done. That doesn't mean it's perfect and it certainly doesn't mean that things will always work perfectly in application. I just wish so many of the people in charge of this machinery didn't take every instance of fair-minded inquiry into one of their findings in a given case as a seeming personal attack. On the subject of the whole search warrant analogy, I was thinking about something similar earlier today. Almost everyone has seen a movie/TV show where cops enter a place of interest without a warrant, they find something that supports a prior suspicion, and then they leave, using prior information they have to justify getting a warrant to go get what they already know is there. Consider the Braun case from sort of the inverse angle. Suppose you needed a warrant of some before you could drug test a player. Suppose also that getting a warrant is really easy. Baseball is the most gossippy of all major US sports. Guys spend so much time together and there is just an immense amount of time for guys to stand around shooting the breeze. Beat writers, broadcasters and others are around all the time; around the cage, in the clubhouse, on the plane. If a cop wanted to get a warrant on Braun, even if it was really easy to do, would even the friendliest of judges have granted that warrant? If the accusation of a failed test had never been made, would Braun's name even be among the top 50 of guys that anyone suspected of using a banned substance? He exhibits no physical signs. He exhibits no performance signs. He exhibits no emotional signs. There is no apparent motive. There was no apparent need. There hasn't been a single whisper in of anything like this in a sport where hardly anything, from personal quirks to philandering to allegations of PED use, doesn't become at least a whispered rumor within the circles of those closest to the game. People tend to think the media doesn't keep these secrets anymore, but that's not entirely true. They will protect guys, but once a story breaks a lot of the behind-the scenes rumors see the light of day. Not once in the wake of this stuff has anything surfaced about Braun from sources who would know. Not once. Not a single instance of "I heard from a guy who heard from a guy who . . " The allegation simply doesn't square with what we think we know. I fully recognize that there is a LOT that nobody knows about anybody and I'm not saying it's impossible that Braun is just putting a huge, ballsy lie out there to protect himself. It just doesn't seem to be the most likely scenario in this situation. I can only wonder how this all would have gone down with just two different facts. Assume there is no leak. Then assume that the case played out along the exact same timeline except that the decision came down 2-1 against Braun. How incredulously stunned would everyone have been on Thursday? It's entirely possible that MORE people nationwide would be on Braun's side than there are right now in the wake of his victory, simply because a larger segment simply wouldn't believe it coming out of the blue like that.

Drug testing in a world where procedures don't matter:

Another excellent point, xis, which futher illustrates the fact that MLB's case IS the procedure. It IS the documentation. No human being could be expected to recall all those details weeks later. What we can expect is that they document what they do, even if means simply checking a box on a form after doing only a cursory exam of the seals. Attention to detail is crucial. If you can't be counted on to perform every step of the procedure, including the documentation, how can we rely on your testimony that you were rigorous in every other detail of the procedure which is vital to producing a reliable result. As Braun noted yesterday, if a player has to be 100% certain about everything he eats, every vitamin he takes, every shake that he drinks, every prescription medication his doctor gives him, the least we can expect is for the people who are going to sit in judgment of his perfection to at least do those particular jobs with equal perfection.

That's a certainly a good alternative, pretendastronaut, and it's hard to argue with making such a statement. I think I may have gone that way as well were I in those shoes. I have no doubt that Braun's team went over all their options exahustively. The certainly seem to have been much better prepared for all of this than has MLB. As for the duplication arguments, I's certainly like to know more about the entire factual basis. My educated guess at what they argued tells me that there is a very strong danger of overselling that angle in Braun's defense. The bottom line is that, once you get into science arguments, the testers are always working from the actual data of the actual test and those attempting to beat the test are almost always working from a position of speculation. It may be very well-supported speculation, but in terms of the typical arbitration hearing the testers have a result that was generated by a full documented procedures which were executed in compliance with the applicable standards. That's pretty hard to beat with a hypothesis of what might have gone wrong, even when you are able to show that the hypothesis is plausible. In this case you have a breakdown in the process, so that will almost always be the better point of attack. The other stuff is ancillary and acts more as another hurdle for MLB to surmount that it does an as affirmative alternative explanation for the particular result.

Good point, xixxisxis. That is a perfect example of one "potential" problem for those so asking. As I've noted, people testing for things don't go out of their way to figure out all the things that could possibly go wrong. They rule out all the probable things that can go wrong by following the pre-test procedures (checking pH, checking specific gravity, etc) and, having followed the procedures, they are confident in the ultimate result of the test. That doesn't mean that NOTHING can go wrong though, and you'd never know if it was wrong unless you went looking specifically for exactly what went wrong If the athlete wants to say that something is wrong with the test, he has to prove exactly what was wrong with that specific test performed weeks before in a lab far away.

No, you can't spontaneously sprout synthetic T in urine sample, but the test that "determines" that synthetic T is present does not actually find synthetic T in urine. What it does is identify the metabolites produced when T is used up by your body processes. It identifies them only by very precisely detemining when the remnants of those metabolites pass in front of a sensor after the urine sample has been literally turned into a gas. The gas rises up a tube and the different remnant rise at microscopically different rates. A sensor records data about these remnants as they pass by. This data is turned into a printout (though it can also be evaluated just as numbers). Then you look on your printout for a peak at a given "time" on the graph, you measure that peak and make a determination as to what that means. Here's the catch. What if two different things are passing by the sensor at a give time? If you are predisposed to think that everything passing by that sensor at that specific time is indicative of synthetic T, you're going to get a big peak that looks like a lot of synthetic T that is actually only a mcuh smaller amounts of two different things. (And that small amount, for reasons alluded to in posts long ago, would not mean that there was a small amount of synthetic T, either. A determination of synthetic T being present can only be made by comparing ratios of different carbon ions, both of which are present in nature, and then making a statistical hypothesis that a certain ratio is "out of whack" with what would normally be expected in a given sample. It's diagnostic art and statistics as much as anything. This is a vast oversimplification, but the point is that you don't "find' synthetic T waving back at you from under a microscope. These tests are extraordinarily complex in nature. Just reading this simplified version should provide further insight into why I say it's virtually impossible for the athlete to challenge the conclusion of the testers when they say they're right.

dlk9s, Go back up the thread and find the pictures xisxisxis posted. That's the kind of thing from which the determination of synthetic T being present is made. Let's just say the there is a whole lot more to determining that sythentic T is present than having a red light turn on on the machine which indicates, without question, that synthetic T is present. I know you know I've posted extensively about the science/technology stuff and you can perhaps look at some of those again for some general ideas as to how this can happen. The more telling point might be, as I alluded to in the "false positive" thread, most often you just don't know. The risk of not knowing falls on the player, despite the fact that he has no control over any of the process. I really wish we had access to more data so that people who really understand this stuff better than I do could dig into it.