I genuinely don't care what he did except to the degree that I'm interested in following the outcome of the 2012 baseball season. Braun playing 162 games or 112 games matters a lot there. Further, I support the existence of some sort of testing program for *only* the following two reasons

1. People who aren't me seem to want one to make baseball worthy of their attention.

2. I think the risks of permitting drug use means that, on a team level, drug use could be implicitly required.

But a testing program only establishes a mimetic justice. Start with a factual principle - a clean test doesn't mean a player didn't use drugs - and work outward. This truth kind of destabilizes everything we think we know about what is or isn't in a player's body, but because we need to test/suspend we can't let that fact paralyze us. So you set up a system and you seal it off with rules. The most basic two rules are these:

1. A player is absolutely responsible for what is in his body. This will keep lame excuses like Dennis Mitchell's "I drank two beers and fucked some track groupies so my testosterone was raised" safely out of the conversation.

2. The governing body is absolutely responsible for following a set procedure for collecting, protecting, and testing samples. This will keep arguments like Braun (and Merlene Ottey's, if we want to expand the scope here) safely out of the conversation.

These rules form... some kind of metaphorical fragile thing for us to balance on... a rope, whatever. If you cut part of the rope, you can't balance on what's left over because it's just dangling there. As I said above, it's worth it for Braun to get off the hook on this if it means MLB will be more careful about following the pretty basic rules that it set for itself governing this. The rope stays intact and we can balance on it and get whatever we want out of testing, moral clarity, etc.

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"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad