Ryan Braun, the National League’s Most Valuable Player, pleaded his case Thursday before a three-member panel that will decide whether he faces a 50-game suspension for testing positive for elevated levels of testosterone.
The appeal came just two days before Braun will accept his MVP award at the New York Chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s dinner Saturday night at the New York Hilton, sources familiar with Braun told the Daily News.
The panel, made up of MLB Players Association executive director Michael Weiner, MLB executive vice president for labor relations Rob Manfred and independent arbitrator Shyam Das, is not expected to reach a decision before Braun accepts his award. But our guess would be that it won’t take more than a week.
Braun is maintaining a cry of innocence, but that early-October PED test showed insanely high levels of synthetic testosterone in his bloodstream and you have to wonder how he could possibly attempt to prove that it wasn’t ever there. Calling the test result a false-positive isn’t going to cut it, and arguing that something non performance-enhancing triggered the positive reading would require a whole lot of convincing.
