Braun's Dark Cloud Not Going Away Any Time Soon

Last Thursday, baseball arbitrator Shyam Das overturned Ryan Braun’s 50-game suspension, which was imposed after synthetic testosterone in a urine sample taken on Oct. 1. While the NL MVP believes that this successful appeal was “the first step in restoring [his] good name and reputation,” it appears as though Braun may still have a long road ahead of him. Fans are wary of the successful appeal because Braun’s innocence wasn’t proven, a loophole was found in the process. To make matters worse, press conferences with Braun in the past five days have only further confused baseball fans as Braun continues to talk about matters that were never discussed in the hearing.

Writers T.J. Quinn and Mark Fainaru-Wada of ESPN.com discuss the lingering uncertainty saying, “The cloud over Ryan Braun’s Acquittal has only gotten thicker as his case has turned into a cold war between Major League Baseball and its reigning National League MVP.” According to Quinn and Fainaru-Wada’s article, Braun has made public statements questioning the integrity of his sample by bringing up such possible accusations as tampering, and MLB isn’t happy with Braun for doing so. It only seems fair that they would feel that way if it is true, as sources say, that Braun never once questioned the samples integrity at his hearing. But then, the MLB isn’t happy with the investigation in general because they believe that protocol was as the collector saw fit, and support the collector’s decision to have sent the specimen on Monday.

But the real skepticism in this situation comes more from what Braun isn’t saying than what he is saying. According to sources, Braun and his defense never once tried to argue against the positive test. Many fans are seeing this as an admission of guilt in the same way that fans immediately concluded Mark McGwire was guilty of using illegal steroids back in 2005 when he said to Congress, “I'm not here to talk about the past," rather than supplying a straight forward answer. In The Cambridge Companion to Baseball there is an essay by Leonard Cassuto and David Grant entitled “Babe Ruth, sabermetrics, and baseball’s politics of greatness.” As the essay’s title suggests, the topic of greatness, who defines greatness, and the problems faced in defining greatness. During this discussion of greatness, the topic of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds’ troubles with getting into the Hall of Fame due to their links to PEDs. These three great ball players and the problems they have faced, make is all the less surprising that Braun has been met with such negativity and skepticism.

It also brings to mind a very real question, is Braun ever really going to be able to recover his “good name and reputation” after this incident, guilty or not? Cassuto and Grant write, “We say that those who are in the Hall must be great and, that if they’re great and not yet in, that they should be, that election will validate their greatness [. . .] But a telling story is the difficulty McGwire is having—and that Sosa and Bonds will soon have—entering the hallowed halls of Cooperstown. Their careers are being measured on a non-statistical, moral yardstick.” It may be too early in Braun’s career to consider his Hall of Fame potential, but Braun’s new reality is that his statistics are going to be seen as illegitimate in the eyes of some fans, writers, and even other players. Even if he never has problems again, at the very least, there will always be some people who are going to continue to question the legitimacy of Braun’s NL MVP award. Whether it’s fair for him to be judged, fair for him to have been let off the hook, or fair for him to get to keep his title is for each individual baseball fan to decide. Sorry Braun, but if Bill James believes it’ll take another thirty or forty years* for McGwire, Bonds, and Sosa to be voted into the Hall of Fame, it’s bound to take much more than a week to clear your name.

(Picture found Here)

*As qtd. in “Babe Ruth, sabermetrics, and baseball’s politics of greatness”

My Baseball Obsession?

Last week, thanks to T.R. Sullivan, baseball fans were given an inside look at what Rangers players and their families were having shipped down to Arizona for training camp, swing set and all. Spring training is now officially in full swing. Fans are itching for another season, and it seems that during spring training more than at any other point in the season, fans are grasping for any piece of information out there. It’s at this time that we get blogs about A-Rod bringing his own cooler of food around with him rather than ordering off the menu, and quotes from batting practice that are a little out of the ordinary. It is in this time, before the season gets under way that we care that Tony LaRussa turned up at the Tigers’ spring training--and need assurance that he’ll make an appearance at the Cardinal’s training camp, too. 


But why do we care? Why should we care? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that fans want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than itself. Maybe it’s because we like to be reminded that these athletes we hold up on a pedestal are real people, too. Why else would US Weekly’s “Just Like Us” on-going picture slideshow be so popular, as ridiculous as it is to know that they grocery shop too? 
 

How much should we care about our favorite teams and beloved players? It’s a hard question to answer.  Fever Pitch, the 2005 film starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, seems to make it okay to be in your thirties, still have Red Sox sheets on your bed, and be taking time off from work to go act like a college kid on Spring Break at spring training. Of course, Waugh’s life is simply a figment of Coover’s imagination, but seeing that extreme sure can make you wonder, how far does “fan” go before you get to obsession?

In Robert Coover’s book The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., readers shown an extreme example of the obsessed fan when the main character creates his own dice game in which he is essentially playing God with his own league. The players in his league have lives, careers, and memories that all come from Waugh’s mind. Being a fan of MLB just wasn’t enough for Waugh and so the Universal Baseball Associate was born. But when his imaginary player Damon Rutherford “dies,” as a roll of the dice commands, Waugh falls into a depression so real that it affects his job and makes others around him believe that a relative has died, and worry about him. As mentioned, this of course is an extreme case of obsession, but it certainly did spark my curiosity as read through the details of these real players lives. Why do we care so much? Why does it matter that A-Rod is on a high protein diet and skipped on guacamole while he was hanging out poolside? Why do we need to know Cabrera is yelling, “Si, Motherf*****r!” after every hit over the fence? When does it stop being our business and remain purely the business of the person who is living the life we’re reading about---celebrity or not?