Ryan Braun tests positive for PED

[alnorth]

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.

[KC_Connection]

Originally Posted by alnorth

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).

Not really a surprise that the Braun camp tried to influence the media by stretching the truth or saying something that wasn't true. That's the way this works and it happens with every high-profile athlete that has ever tested positive for anything.

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.

Yeah, that's what I've been trying to explain. The most reasonable explanation for his positive test is that he took something to trigger it. I never understood why some were giving him the benefit of the doubt that they didn't give to so many others.