Ryan Braun: Does It Matter to MLB If He Actually Used PEDs?

The story of Ryan Braun continues to be front page news and it will continue to be for the rest of the 2012 MLB season and possibly his entire career.

Did he or did he not use PEDs?  That question still hasn't really been answered.  If you ask MLB, the answer is yes he did because his sample was not tampered with and was properly tested, revealing the heightened testosterone levels. 

If you ask Braun, he absolutely did not, yet he cannot provide any type of realistic answer as to why his test results came back the way it did.

Does it even matter though?

Braun should be suspended.  There is no second way about it.  Whether he did take PEDs or not. 

This "dramatic" tale has become the storyline of one man against the evils of MLB and their "flawed" system.  Doesn't that alone go against what baseball even stands for?

No one man is bigger than the game in baseball.  No one man is more important than the team.  Just look at Matt Kemp for a perfect example. 

Kemp had an incredible year last season.  A split line that reads .324/.399/.586 is a monster year.  Add in the 39 home runs, the 126 runs batted in and the 115 runs scored and there is no question how talented Kemp is. 

But it didn't matter.  The game wouldn't let it make a difference.  The Los Angeles Dodgers didn't make the playoffs because one man can not carry a team.

And one man should not be the major story of spring training.  Or the 2012 season.  Yet, Braun most likely will be all because he had his suspension overturned.  If Braun was suspended, people would move past it.  Even if he denied ever using, people would have just moved on.

But instead, what Braun has done is taken a game that is about the team, about the league and about the fans and made it into a one-man show.  A one-man show about the one thing Major League Baseball can't afford to have it about, steroids.

The image that MLB has worked so hard to restore, the steroid era that baseball has worked so hard to move past is now all being called into doubt.  Does Major League Baseball really care about steroids, or was it just a publicity stunt to try to bring back some of the older generation of fans?

Braun showed more negative character traits in being OK with undoing the years of work that MLB put in to try to fix the image of their brand than he could have possibly done by just shutting his mouth and accepting the suspension.

Innocent or not, this black mark will absolutely hurt MLB, and Braun will probably never recover from it.