pebadger

Here's the problem with Braun making any technical arguments yesterday: Intelligent as he is, he's simply not the guy you want out there making those arguments. They're too technical, too subtle and probably not entirely dispositive of the case in the way that would satisfy the "we demand a full accounting" crowd. If you start down that road, you're going to get followup questions and Braun is not equipped to answer them in all likelihood. What's worse, the followup question might be an awful question that sounds like it makes sense, but it probably doesn't. It's hard to answer a bad question in a good way unless you are extremely well-versed in the subject matter which you are addressing. Second, you invite in a whole bunch of outside experts into the case who are going to populate every talk outlet and talk about something of which they have no first-hand knowledge of the facts. Most of them will probably be hostile to Braun's position and they will amke any honest mistake by a person less well-versed than them look like dissembling and lies. It's just the nature of how these things go, and we've already seen it as everybody with a stake in the anti-doping world has already weighed in after probably spending less time with the particulars of this case than most of us have. Braun and his people simply aren't going to win a 'science-y' media war against a group that has honed their "we're always right, athletes always cheat" rhetoric for over 20 years now. The bottom line is, if you start arguing science you may get maneuvered into the position of being required by the media to construct an entire narrative based on science, which is probably simply not plausible. The media has clearly lost sight of the fact that, no matter what the legal construct is, a reasonable person should be expecting MLB to be the ones constructing that narrative, as that narrative is their entire case. MLB is shielded from having to make this case by the very cloak of secrecy which was breached; a breach that, by its very existence, served to shift that same onus onto Braun. Don't think that how any of this spin machine works out happened just by accident. The system is designed to almost always beat the athlete in the hearing, and further designed to continue to impugn his character in almost every case in which he does win. It's no accident that I was able to predict the "technicality" line of post-verdict attack way back on December 11.

The funny thing about the whole "Bud's team" chatter is that my father-in-law has felt for years that the Brewers have been punished by the umpires and certain actions of other clubs because they were Bud's team. It's all a matter of your incoherent conspiratorial perspective.

I think you are right as to MLB's argument, Jeffy but I also think it needs to be put into what I'm guessing is the proper context. My guess is that MLB only had to make that argument because Braun's side presented enough of a case to put MLB into the position of having to do extra work in proving that their errors didn't have any impact on the result. In other words, I think Braun's team made enough of a case to cause the presumption of guilt to go away. That in itself is no small achievement, and is likely not based solely on the simple "oops" defense. Obviously I can't say that for certain, but nobody can say for certain what happened when the sample was not sitting on a shelf at FedEx. MLB is simply arguing, in more words, that it shouldn't matter where the package was kept, despite the dictates of their own policy. They are arguing, in effect, that their rules don't matter, only the result does. I personally don't think it's likely that there was a nefarious plot to get Braun on the part of the courier, but that doesn't mean that there aren't simply a whole lot of other things that might have happened in that time frame beyond the control of either of those parties that may have affected the subsequent result. It's MLB's rules. It's MLB's test procedure. They broke the rules. They should bear the burden of proof that their test result is valid even in light of the procedural violation. It's the only fair approach to the situation.

Yes, Carroll says his sources claim that Braun's people were able to recreate the result and presented that evidence to the panel. I don't want to run afoul of spilling too much of the beans in a copyrighted work that is currently clearly still in the marketplace. I wouldn't place too much weight on nobody else picking up on this. For now everything is in spin mode anyway. Sooner or later people will get access to more official documentation and then there will be a brief interruption in the bloviating so that actual facts can be released and subsequently spun.

You are correct in that jeffy. I apologize if it seemed like I was coming across as hostile toward you, as I made roughly the same comment in the 'Identity' thread yesterday. Dino is in the same general position as Braun. He is there either because he put himself there (through negligence or otherwise) or because of unfortunate circumstance. Recognizing that it could be either or for both of these guys, I wonder if the same people who will be sympathetic to the courier's situation will be equally sympathetic to Bruan's in the absence of any further facts.

Another thing while I'm riled up this morning. I keep seeing it mention that "there is no indication that this is a false positive" or words to that effect. Leaving aside the fact that we are not privy to any evidence regarding the test at all, other than the mere assertion that Braun is guilty, this is a sentence that betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of science. Assume we run a test multiple times and get this dataset of results: 4.4, 5.0, 5.3, 5.4, 6.3, 7.9, 12.0. Assume that any result from 4.0 to 8.0 is a "positive" for whatever test we are running. Which one is the false positive? The answer is that ANY of the first 6 results could be a false positive, and you simply don't know which one it is. The last data point is not a positive in any sense. The 7.9 is no more or less likely to be a false positive then the 5.4, provided you have a properly conducted test and properly constructed criteria for identifying a "positive". This is something the media and public quite simply do not grasp. They conflate the idea of an outlier and a false positive. Identifying a true false positive is difficult. Sometimes it's impossible. Even if you can eventually figure out that a result is a false positive, you may never know the WHY? If you can explain the WHY, and that "why" is a potentially recurring "why", you redesign/imporve the test to take into account the conditions that caused the false positive. This is how science works. Note that a false positive is NOT generally a result that can simply be explained away by a cursory examination of the data. If you can look at a datapoint and immediately discern that it's wrong, you don't classify that result as positive simply because it fits the criteria You classify it as junk and throw it out because it's an invalid datapoint. People seem to think that Braun is truly innocent he should be able to simply look at Montreal's lab documentation and exclaim "Oh, you silly Canadians! You forgot to divide by X!" It's just not how it works. If it were that easy, they lab shouldn't be conducting the test because they're a terrible lab. The entire burden of proving that an actual false positive is indeed false is on the player in a drug test situation. You can see how that is a virtual impossibility in a one-off situation. So we go way back to the question posed at the start of the original thread. Suppose you are Braun. Suppose you are actually truly innocent. How are you going to win the case? He won it the best way he could. Probably the only way he could. People demanding more simply don't get it. If they don't get it because they don't have a full understanding of the nature of the game that's one thing. If they don't get it because of their own internal biases, that's something else entirely.

Braun did not directly accuse the collector of anything. That's in stark contrast to the situation occupied by Braun in which the unsupported accusation is the conviction for a massive swath of the population. Here's a question. Instead of the media hounding Braun to explain the test result, why isn't the media hounding MLB to explain the test result? It's their test. Even if they answer "no comment", don't you still at least ASK the question? They know they aren't going to be getting an answer from Braun, yet they ask him the question (directly or in print) every 5 minutes. Somebody alert the world when anybody asks the same of the people that are actually responsible for conducting the test. It's just baffling to me how so may people can just accept the fact that as soon as an accusation is made it's entirely on Braun to "clear his name", and that the only way he can do that is to somehow become omniscient about a test procedure that he did not perform and that was totally under the control of a party with interests adverse to his own. Does that make any sense at all? Does it make any sense that, just because the rather one-sided drug testing system doesn't care about any forms of evidence other than their own test, that reasonable people can't evaluate the case by their own standards in coming to conclusions? Why would Braun cheat? What is the evidence other than a single test result, proven to have been procured outside the designed protocol, that indicates that Braun had any actual motive to cheat, much less anything close to even anecdotal evidence or performance-based evidence of cheating? To just brush these questions off with the implication that "all these guys cheat and they're both stupid an arrogant enough to think they can get away with it" is not only insulting to the vast majority of these guys who are not cheats, it's a dangerous manner of thinking in broader societal terms. In the world of science, you must defend your results to show that they are reproducible. When your results are at odds with all other available information, most times people want you to prove that your results really are good. In this case MLB can't reproduce anything, because it is a one-shot deal. It has been proved that in performing their one-shot deal, MLB did not follow rules that are in place to enhance the validity of a test that can't be performed again. The procedures are MLB's safeguard for their data. In a real sense, the procedures ARE the case. The case comes down, by MLB's own design, to nothing more than them doing a science experiment. They can even be WRONG in their conclusions, provided they simply do the test according to the recipie, and they still win the case. And yet we still expect the one guy who did nothing more than provide the sample to be the one who has to explain, to a virtual certainty, all the million things that might have happened after he provided that sample. Am I wrong in thinking that seems to be entirely insane?

I think that's the angle that's being sold or spun after the fact. At the hearing the whole point of bringing up the chain of custody issue was to shift the burden of persuasion back onto MLB which was the smart tactical goal. It's clear that they simply don't know why the test turned out like it did, if Braun is in fact innocent. The whole DNA thing may simply have been a ploy on the Braun camp's part, especially if the MLB case unhinged a bit after the impact of the CoC stuff became clear. It's likely that MLB themselves weren't clear as to what happened, especially if the courier's testimony looked bad, and if there was ANY possibility that it wasn't Braun's sample MLB simply couldn't afford to take that chance when first offered (an offer which, if actually made, was probably stunning to the MLB counsel). Can you imagine if they immediately accepted the offer and it actually turned out that they had the wrong sample as proved by DNA? The public relations disaster would have been of biblical proportions. MLB may have figured out after the offer was made that they should have accepted immediately, but by then it was too late and the Braun camp had a useful post-case talking point in their arsenal if needed. This is all pure speculation, but I think from all I've seen and heard so far that Braun's camp was much better prepared for a real fight than the MLB side that probably arrogantly figured they'd just paint-by-numbers on this case an win without too much trouble. ----- Continued here: viewtopic.php?f=63&t=30583

It was a PR move, but it was also a "we have to set something up ourselves or Congress is gonna turn us over to USADA and then we're all really screwed" business move on the part of both the players and the owners. If that had happened, you'd have guys serving out 2-year first offense bans right now which is clearly something neither the players or the owns want.

And yet we have a testing system which disregards all such pleas to other evidence that any rational person would view as relevant and discards them with a notion that they have a test result and you have to prove it wrong. And then kills you anyway when you win because they messed up in a way that they simply want everyone to disregard.

With respect to the Carroll piece, 99 cents means more to some than others. Fo rfolks like me who have invested too much time into this already it was no big deal. Carroll writes more about the scientific arguments made beyond the simple "oops" factor of not dropping off the package on schedule. It appears that the length of the deliberation probably had something to do with the science arguments that Braun's team did put forth. If I'm putting 2 & 2 together correctly from what I've learned from this piece and other sources, it seems that by making the chain argument that Braun was able to flip the burden of proof back onto MLB (as such a gaffe should). It seems that Dr Ayotte came down from Montreal, where she heads the lab, and testified that the sample was not tampered with, but we know from other sources that Braun's team never alleged that it was tampered with, so the fact that she came down to testify on that point (and others) is pretty strong support for the idea that once the CoC issue was raised MLB was backpedalling. I'm guessing they just assumed that the usual testimony of "Trust us, we're experts and he's guilty because we say so" was going to be enough and that was going to put the onus back on Braun. Honestly the Carroll piece isn't a lengthy treatise but it does indicate that there is much more to the story than the simple "oops, loophole" narrative, as most reasonable people had already gathered. He has sources as to what happened at the hearing, but without more of the written record and data he couldn't really write more than what he did. Assuming the written decision is eventually leaked by somebody, we'll be able to verify what he has written. Honestly you can probably get the gist of most of what he wrote just by following his Twitter account. Just as an aside, if you don't mind reading on a laptop, in the event you don't have a Kindle or other reader, the Kindle PC/Mac app is pretty cool and there are more free classic books to download than you'll ever read.

The problem with #3 is that they simply don't know how to take them into account in many cases, even if taking the substances is disclosed. It would be almost impossible for the testers to figure out everything that is going on with a test if you take one of these supplements. It would simply take too much original research, which takes a lot of time and a lot of money. It would be impossible for them to catch cheats who properly take masking agents. That's why they put the onus on the player. If they run into something they can't deal with analytically, they just put it on the banned list and it becomes the player's problem. No exceptions. I agree that there is a difference between out-and-out cheating and getting caught up in a mess you didn't intend to make, but there is absolutely no desire to add any intent element to any case in the drug testing realm. To do so would undermine the 'strict liability' standard that generally applies in this area.

The circling of the wagons by USADA, WADA, Dick Pound and every other anti-doping personality with no dog in the fight (or any more access to the facts than you and I) is totally predictable. None of these people is going to rest from attacking while there is microphone or camera available.

He's either dirty or the victim of circumstance (circumstances which may be related to a level of negligence on his part). So he's basically in the same position as Braun, except that if he's formally accused of being dirty he'll get the legal benefit of the doubt.

Don't you need a Kindle? There is a free Kindle app available for both PCs and Macs that allows you to read anything you could read on a Kindle.

Nice work in digging up that Modahl stuff, topper. Testing has changed considerably since then, but what can happen to samples that are improperly handled has not.

1) Agree that procedures can always be made better. Usually it costs more to make it so, but cost probably shouldn't be anything that baseball owners and players should be whining about at this particular moment. 2) Sure, but how are you going to do it? Who bears the burden of proof that it was "unintentional"? How do you make these determinations based on anything other than a subjective appraisal of the defendant's story, in the absence of some facts like those of the JC Romero case? Not saying it can't be done, but people have looked at trying to construct workable legal standards for differentiating "cheats" from less-culpable unfortunate victims of circumstance and they just haven't worked out for a lot of reasons. A chief reason being that the testers are philosophically opposed to the very idea that there is much, if any of a distinction between the two positions. 3) This is a technical issue as much as anything. Very many substances on the list are there because they interfere with the ability of tests to find the really bad stuff. If you take them off, you open the door to cheating, or so the argument goes. If you look at the MS results xisxisxis posted in the other thread, you can start to get an idea of what a mess some of this work really is for people who are committed to finding scientific truth. It's not easy and changing the list without the technical requirements of the job in mind is a non-starter. As for other angles on the whole OTC "supplement" industry, don't get me started . . .

Anybody else think it's hilarious that it's going to ESPN's hometown charity, The Jimmy V Fund?

I'm sure someone here (pebadger/xisxisxis) could chime in if this is accurate. Pretty much accurate, though there have been numerous hearing at which a number of labs (the French lab for one) where confidentiality has proven no to be a big concern. The people who tested Floyd Landis' samples admitted at the hearing that not only did they know whose sample they were testing, it was quite simple for them to figure out the identity of any sample that came through their lab due to the way things were coded. I have little doubt that things work much better at the Montreal lab, which is considered one of the top 2 or 3 in the world, but you never know. People are people and there is obviously a way to connect the number back to the name. You just need access to the key that connects the two. I'm not saying that I think anybody in Montreal was crooked in this regard. Just pointing out that rigorous procedures are fine, but in the end every rigorous procedure depends on the diligence and goodwill of the people charged with executing the procedure.

On what might have happened: In a nutshell, we just don't know what MIGHT have happened, and that's the point. Nobody knows what might have happened. Why should it be up to Braun to prove what MIGHT have happened when the necessary procedure underlying the test wasn't followed? When you set up a test to give you a certain yes/no result, you're mostly interested in constructing a procedure that will give you confidence in the result of the test. In essence, you write a set of directions that, if followed, will give you a result that is as good as it can be. ot perfect (nothing is), but as good as we can make it. In this case, the handling procedures exist as part of that set of directions. In constructing the procedure in this fashion you aren't really concerned about every possible thing that can go wrong. You just know that if you follow the procedure, you don't have to worry about what might go wrong. The fact of the matter is, tons of things can go wrong in tests like this. The more complex the test, the more that can go wrong. It's impractical, if not impossible, to pinpoint everything that could possibly go wrong with a given test procedure. There are just way too many variables to consider. From a pure "applied science" standpoint (as opposed to matters of theoretical interest), what might go wrong is irrelevant once you construct a procedure that works. All you have to do is follow the validated procedure and you get a good result the vast, vast majority of the time. There are still errors possible, but they are unlikely and even harder (i.e., impossible) to pinpoint in a one-off situation that doesn't have multiple designed runs of controlled experimental data from which to make educated guesses about the process that produced the strange result. In other words, you can't, for the most part tell when or why a bad result happens, because the nature of the procedure isn't even telling you it's bad. The only indication you get that a result is bad is the subject telling you it's bad, and the drug test systems then requires that subject to be the one to prove it's bad. The only thing MLB had to do was demonstrate that they followed the procedure and they likely would have won the case, assuming that IF they had followed procedure they would have gotten the same result. That's simply not an assumption that it's fair to make. In fact, in spite of that and even not following procedure drug testers have won in the past anyway. What MIGHT have happened? Who knows? It's not Braun's responsibility to answer that question and it's frankly unfair to ask. It's fine to be curious about it. I know I am. It doesn't give anyone the right to DEMAND an explanation from a person who, if truly innocent, is about as well positioned to answer that question as any of the rest of us.

On false positives: Let's say there are 5000 players in organized ball. If 1% are doping then you have 50 dirty players. Let's say we test all the players on the same day and the test is correct 99% of the time. In other words, 99% of the time it will say an clean player is clean and a dirty player is dirty. This also means however that 1% of the time a clean player will be accused of taking drugs and a dirty player will "beat" the test. So we test the 50 dirty guys. The test will catch all 50 of them. Test the 4950 clean players. The test will clear 4900 players and yield 50 positives. So we have a pool of 100 positive test results, yet only half of those positives are actual positives. And since we don't know who the dirty player really are, if you pick one of these positive results at random you have a 50/50 shot at accusing an innocent man of being a cheat. Let's say that you are able to increase the reliabiliy of the test to only being wrong 1 time in 1000, a tenfold increase in the reliability of the test. You still catch all 50 of the dirty guys, but will still end up with 5 false positives. This means that if you pick a positive at random you still have a 9% chance of accusing an innocent man. Now let's assume 1% is too low a number of cheaters. Let's make it 2% (which is still less than 1 per 40 man roster at the MLB level). With a 99% test you catch 99 actual cheats, but one goes free. You also accuse 49 innocent men. Roughly 1/3 of all accusations will be false. If you imporve the test by a factor of 10, you still have a false positive rate of nearly 5%. As you can see, knowing a true "false positive" rate is dependant on knowing both how good the test is and the actual rate of cheaters in the population. It's pretty much impossible to know the actual rate of cheaters in the population. Going back to a post I made way back in December, the bigger problem is that the people who could have a very good idea of how good the test is in a statistical sense have simply not done any long-term or longitudinal studies on that matter. The bottom line is that we don't know with any statistical certainty what the false positive rate is. The testers have no incentive to take any action that will diminish the image of the test in public eyes. Individual athletes are in no position to conduct such scientific research. many of the people doing the science are not especially interested in what might go wrong. They are interested in how to get even better at catching cheaters. The sad thing is, the better you get at detecting even trace amounts off illegal substances, the more likely you are to accuse people of intentional wrongdoing who have done no such thing. So in the end we are left with tests that very are good, but not as good as they should be. We are left with a system in which a test result is deemed to be 100% correct and which can't really be attacked directly. We are left with a system in which the best, and sometimes ONLY, way for a truly innocent athlete to win a case of thise type is to win exactly the way Ryan Braun did. His reward? Being almost more vilified as not only a cheat, but a conniving, cynical cheat who worked the system.

He knocked it out of the park. Anyone asking Braun to explain something that he is neither in a position nor specifically educated enough to explain still doesn't get it.

The more I read/listen the more it becomes apparent that even media outlets that are making an attempt to be fair just don't get it. You can't put up a poll question or fish for comments on the subject "Who is to blame?" without at least implicitly taking the position that Braun is a cheat who got away with it and that the exercise to be engaged in now is the assignment of blame for that state of affairs. The cart is so far before the horse in all this coverage that you can't even see the cart with the unaided eye. The only thing keeping us from still burning witches (in most of the world) is our secular techological advancement. The human mind is clearly still a fertile place for the kind of psychology that leads to such acts.

Let's just say there is a reason these cases almost always end up 2-1 in the tester's favor. There are an abundance of 3-0 decisions, too. The number of THOSE decisions that favor the athlete is microscopic.

There are a very limited number of ways in which a party to an arbitration can challenge an arbitration award in court. There are both statutory (for example, the Federal Arbitration Act) and any number of common law grounds for making an argument along those lines. The bottom line is that no matter what theory MLB would pursue in taking such a case to court, they would have an very high standard to meet to even get beyond the summary judgment stage of a proceeding. They would most likely have to show that the decision made as it was due to one of the folowing factors: 1) that the system itself is so unconscionable that it was impossible for MLB to get a fair result; 2) that one or more of the arbitrators acted with actual bias in the case to MLB's injuy; 3) that the arbitrators acted outside the scope of their authority; 4) that the result was rendered on the basis of non-evidentary statements; 5) that the arbitrators refused to hear MLB's evidence without cause; 6) that the arbitrators acted in disregard of the law or the rules of the arbitration. If you've been paying attention at all to how this system actually operates, you know that for MLB to make these argument, other than trying to prove that the deciding vote by Mr Das was "fixed", is almost laughable. Numerous athletes have tried to take on this system, and/or their specific adverse decisions, in the courts. They have gotten nowhere, because the courts simply aren't going to go mucking around inside these arbitrations without a boatload of good reasons to do so. MLB is being a petulant child, just like every other testing organization that loses one of these cases. Going to court on their part would be little more than a hopeful PR expedition that has the added "benefit" of being extremely punitive to Ryan Bruan, and possibly punitive to Mr. Das. I'm guessing MLB is already taking steps to insure that Mr Das never works one of their drug arbitrations again.