The outrage, dimmed though it was for awhile, was kind of hiding what I understood as the league trying to argue that observance of a set of guidelines which they instituted and agreed to contained some sort of wiggle room. There's a bargain at play here and no matter how trivial it seems (and the shipping problems stretch even the bounds of the term "trivial") to make the party in charge of administering punishment the one that observes the exact letter of the law - that strikes me as the necessary bargain for making players responsible for whatever got into their body. Players aren't allowed to say "I don't know how that got there" about their urine content* and the league has to make sure that everything is as airtight as they promised in collective bargaining.

In short, I think there's more at stake here than whether Ryan Braun plays the first fifty games of the season or whether his MVP last year was legitimate. Particularly since his MVP last year should be an open issue of discussion one way or the other. What's at stake is suspensions over non-analytical positives like they use in biking, which strikes me as the sort of thing that can be tremendously weighted according to how popular certain players and teams are. Or further and further invasions of privacy for players in the minor leagues who don't have the collective bargaining strength of their MLB counterparts.

So what I don't like is people carrying for ancient used-car salesmen that can't manage this small job properly. Selig doesn't deserve it, and Ryan Braun (and Barry Bonds and hell, even Juan Rincon if you're me and it's the mid-2000s) is why we watch baseball games. Largely through their own fault in the 90s and 2000s, the players have put themselves in the position of having to repeatedly, randomly prove their innocence and I think it's weird that a commissioner as otherwise unpopular here as Selig gets so much implicit support when we don't require that his office hold up their end of this bargain.

*Or, rather, they can't say that to avoid suspension. I assume pretty much everybody will say that to save their reputation.

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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