Blame Selig for baseball’s fraudulent drug-testing program

I often wonder how many mirrors are in Bud Selig's house.

I wonder if he ever looks into them.

Selig should today, because this Ryan Braun mess falls directly at the feet of baseball and its commissioner, at the guy who has wanted you to believe for some time his league offers the toughest drug-testing program in professional sports.

Which is like saying when it comes to holding athletes accountable for using performance-enhancing drugs, Major League Baseball is the best Little League team in town.

Who cares?

This is one of the regrettable byproducts of collective bargaining, a drug-testing program with no transparency or rigorous guidelines. These are the loopholes it creates when league officials and union heads and all the other suits begin hammering out details, the inadequate procedures that lead to what transpired Thursday.

Braun is off the hook, parading his innocence and a smile that stretches across Wisconsin, buoyed by the decision of an arbitrator to overturn a 50-game suspension handed down to the National League's Most Valuable Player for a positive drug test.

Circle today's date. It has happened: We found an athlete with better attorneys than Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s.

Believe what you want about Braun, whose testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio was 20:1 when the trigger point for a positive test is 4:1 and Average Joe walks around at 1:1.

He and his attorneys didn't argue the test's result but rather the chain of custody his urine sample went through. Braun and those he paid top dollar to defend him discovered the loophole, exposing one of many faults with the testing program.

The story is about something much bigger than if the person in charge of shipping Braun's sample on time is the same guy who snuck all those fat grams into the frozen yogurt on "Seinfeld."

It's about baseball's program being far less stringent than it could and should be.

You can't police and promote your sport at the same time and maintain any sense of integrity when it comes to those who cheat. At its heart, I believe baseball wants to catch those using, wants to suspend them and hold them publicly accountable as bad examples among good ones.

You also can be sure it wants to keep selling tickets and for you to continue enjoying all those home runs.

Had baseball been serious about implementing a drug-testing program that would rival the planet's finest, it would have opened its doors wide to the World Anti-Doping Agency instead of insisting it could create a strict enough program on its own.

It would have patterned itself after WADA instead of turning its nose at it.

It would have pushed harder for transparency when negotiating with the union. It would have demanded player samples be tested for the 60 stimulants that WADA lists as banned substances instead of the 30 or so they collectively bargained.

It would have forgotten about cost and used Carbon Isotope Ratio as its screen test for all urine samples, because CIR is foolproof and its results indisputable for synthetic versus natural testosterone.

It would have adopted a system in which players can't continue to cheat and micro-dose, keeping their levels just under that 4:1 ratio, still able to have nearly four times the level of normal testosterone in their bodies and gain all the performance benefits that follow without raising red flags.

It should have pushed for the same system that caught Olympic gold medalist Justin Gatlin and cyclist Floyd Landis.

It's true the majority of baseball fans long ago stopped caring about who uses and who doesn't. Home runs. Fantasy leagues. That's where it's at for most.

They couldn't care less that Braun's positive test reportedly was three times higher in ratio than anyone else who had been tested and aren't all that interested in how a sample that was triple-sealed and deemed appropriate for testing might have been tampered with while sitting in a refrigerator for 48 hours.

Believe what you want about Ryan Braun. He got off. An accredited WADA lab didn't find his sample compromised and considered the positive test valid. Sorry. His appeal didn't come close to passing the eye test.

But more than anything else, it being overturned again exposed the myth and fraud that is a huge part of baseball's testing program, one designed in large part to protect the side of the equation where tickets are sold and home runs are hit and fans are updating their fantasy league stats daily.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with that if done so with eyes wide open.

I would think Selig should use his to look in a few of those mirrors.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday on "Monsters of the Midday," Fox Sports Radio 920 AM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.