Ryan Braun Positive PED Test: Time to End the Delusion

In the small hours of November 5, 2008, eager to exuviate the terrible millstone of racial inequity foisted upon them by their forebearers, MSNBC analysts covering the presidential election decided that the United States had as of that moment entered the post-racial era. 

Detached as we are in these latter days of Barack Obama's first term, it might seem silly that a group of adults--educated adults, at that--could think that decades of oppression ended with the election of just one man, but at the time...well, okay, it's always been silly. 

One look at America's criminal justice system can tell you that racism as a tool of oppression is alive and well. African-Americans account for nearly half of all prison inmates despite comprising only about 7% of the country's population. Also, black males are more likely to receive longer sentences and less likely to receive leniency than their white counterparts. 

The point is, it only takes a cursory examination of the pertinent facts to see the fallacy of such hopeful declarations. Such is the case with the baseball writers reacting with shock to the news of National League MVP Ryan Braun's positive test for performance-enhancing drugs. 

It was roughly the same time as Obama's election that writers began to refer to baseball's steroid era in the past tense. Like those doe-eyed MSNBC pundits (who I believe were speaking out of a genuine desire to be rid of our shared heritage of inequality, rather than merely spouting Liberal rhetoric as some of my Conservative friends have sourly opined), baseball's writers were premature in their assumptions that the culture explicitly detailed in Jose Canseco's book is in our past, as if testing were the only obstacle between dirty baseball and clean baseball. 

Braun's positive test is proof to the contrary, and should raise the question not of why so many people are eager to believe the dark days are behind us, but why we assume they are temporary, and not simply the way things are. Instead, we dance around the issue, posing hypothetical questions in our puerile way: What does this say of our testing policy? How does this affect his Hall of Fame credentials? Can his contract be terminated for this? 

How you or I might answer these questions is largely irrelevant. Whether or not Ryan Braun is kept from the Hall for this doesn't address the fact that we continually set ourselves up for disappointment. It should not surprise us that a prominent athlete tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs. That it still does, after all we've seen, all we know, speaks to our near-religious adherence to idealism and idolatry in spite of the salt pillars such things are inevitably built upon. 

More troubling than this is the inconsistency, especially among baseball writers, in how these matters are handled when they do come to light. The heroes of the so-called steroid era are having a hard time finding Hall of Fame votes--a trend that is sure to continue as more of the guilty parties become eligible. Yet as writers and pundits discuss the implications of Ryan Braun's positive test and subsequent 50-game ban, the idea of revoking the Milwaukee All-Star's MVP award has been treated not unlike an embarrassing family secret: dismissed without explanation and avoided at all cost.

It isn't the act of leaving a tainted MVP award in the hands of a cheater that should bother you, nor the inconsistency of not taking it away while at the same time making it impossible for other PED users to get into the Hall of Fame; it's the cowardice implied by this simultaneous action and inaction. 

Rather than taking a stand, baseball's writers are leaving it for the next class to deal with. They claim a lack of precedence, say their hands are tied, and then paradoxically leave the precedence-setting to their heirs. If they are indeed the stewards of the game (as they so often claim to be) then where is the stewardship? Where is the morality in passing the buck, in leaving a greater mess than you found? 

As ever, change does not come from one person, but people. I can rant and rave all I like, but until fans and readers hold the writers accountable for shirking their responsibilities, then our children will be having this conversation thirty years from now, wondering why their parents couldn't get it right the first time around.