A lot of people wanting to believe the great white hope is clean and totally didn't get off on the thinnest of loopholes. Bet most of them also think your boy Bautista is doping (full disclosure I think he might be too, I don't trust that anyone is clean at this point) absent any actual evidence like this and would be all over him in the same situation.

Could a sample even be spiked in some way?

If they're not, they should. There's little reason to trust any source close to Braun in a situation like this. He has every reason to curry media and public favor.

Or MLB didn't even bother dealing with such a bogus claim, knowing that the results were perfectly well within a normal PED user's ratio.

Nobody here knows the exact results of Braun's test. Let's not pretend we do based on a vague report months ago on the basis of a single source supposedly close to Ryan Braun. If the supposed "weirdness" of the sample played any real factor in this arbitrator's decision, it would have been a major factor, not a minor one.

thats kind of why the chain of custody issue is a really big deal. When the chain of custody in a crime scene or testing situation is broken, the defendent or player, even if they are guilty as hell, immediately brings up the spectre of the tainted sample. They don't even have to argue that it was done on purpose, just that no one knows what the hell may have been done to that sample over those few hours.

In this case, assuming the tweets are true, another couple days in the test collector's fridge (so we're not even talking about a guy not authorized to have possession of it) shouldn't be enough by itself, but coupled with an "insanely high" reading, its a problem.

You'd have to presume that they are cross-eyed drooling reeruns, because its not hard to come back with "they are lying, and here's the proof".

Maybe they assumed they didn't have to because no reasonable person would believe a claim like that without evidence from an untrustworthy source?

And of course, there's also the issue for MLB about how this entire process was supposed to be private.

Also, the appeals panel seems like a joke. You know day one how each person will vote, minus the independent arbitrator. I understand these things must be collectively bargained, but that's just stupid.

Heck I could probably see it clearer a player spiking his own urine to mask his use then a company hired to collect the samples destroying their own business(unless the price was right). Guess you could go as far as some 3rd party altering the sample while in the custody of the collector. But that would be James Bond kind of legend

Ha, that would be a bit more difficult than simply using masking agents or undetectable PEDs (which most athletes who use PEDs do).

MLB sources are certainly talking now.

The stories that are out today are saying that Braun's side is arguing that a 20/1 TE ratio was impossibly high.

To say that the result was "impossibly high" is not true, and all those stories about how he tested higher than anyone else in the history of that test is wrong, if the result really was 20/1. (unless they were only talking about MLB players, it could have been the highest MLB result in history)

From what I've read, 20/1 is definitely on the high side of a normal failure range, its rare to get a result that high, and its pretty much impossible if you are not taking anything. However, there were at least two results in US sports history with a result that was not just higher, but FAR higher than that.

I now think Braun was probably dirty.

It is possible that he was clean, in that every test has a positive failure rate, and if he was one of those 1 in a million people or 10 million people or whatever the odds are for that test to get false positives on both samples, then it sucks for him and he's the unluckiest man in all of sports (cancelled out by luck yesterday), but we have to accept a test with a very, very low false positive rate, especially with 2 samples. Someone somewhere someday probably in some olympic sport no one cares about will probably get screwed, but I really doubt that theoretical lottery-winner was Braun.

From what I know that 3rd party arbitrator was a moran. They found synthetic test in his 2nd sample and there are all kinds of drugs that will reduce estrogen while taking testosterone. Using a TE ratio to undermine the results is laughable and I see why the MLB is irate.

I'd be interested to know what his total T level was.

From the ESPN article the founds Synthetic Test in his 2nd sample and Brauns side didn't even dispute that. They just went after the TE ratio.