The shock! The horror! The outrage!!!! Ryan Braun has tested positive for potential use of a banned substance! Something must be done before he ruins all our precious awards forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By now you are familiar with line of logic being espoused by moral high horse-riding columnists and bloggers all across the land. The way they would tell it, the moral fabric of our very society is at stake if we do not find a way to strip Ryan Braun of his NL MVP award and then, if we have spare time, tar and feather him for good measure. That’s all sounds fine and good, but in reality, it is a load of moralistic horse puckey. Those complaints and demands for things to be rectified by an unprecedented re-vote are about as effective as this:
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A re-vote, seriously? Do people even think before they make these outlandish demands? Let’s set aside for a second the fact that Braun is still appealing his test results and that given the limited amount that we know about his test, there is at least some reasonable doubt that he didn’t actually commit a violation of the PED policy. I mean, why bother to let the process run its due course when we can wildly overreact before we know the full story. Presuming innocence is for suckers, am I right?
It clearly makes more sense for use to throw out the old NL MVP votes and vote again, because there is absolutely no way that any of the other MVP candidates allegedly used PEDs. It isn’t like baseball has been ravaged by steroid and amphetamine use for much of the last several decades. Nope, Braun is the only guilty party. Everyone else is clean as a whistle. Just re-vote now and go about our business and never think about it again.
But why stop there? The BBWAA is already tacitally agreed to keep known and suspected PED users out of the Hall of Fame, so why not go back and re-vote on every other award that might have gone to a guy linked to PED use? Let’s clean up all the awards because baseball writers are omniscient beings with unquestionable moral integrity, therefore they are best suited for this kind of revisionist history. No more juicers winning awards! No more ‘roiders in the Hall of Fame!!!!!!
Rabble! Rabble! Rabble! Rabble! Rabble!!!!!
Look, nobody wants to condone Braun’s PED use, if in fact that proves to be what really happens, but there is a reason nobody ever goes back and re-writes the history books. It is the slipperiest of slippery slopes of moral high-hattery. If Braun really is guilty, history will make sure everyone remembers that, much like future generations will always know that Barry Bonds holds the all-time home run record, but that he did so via gallons and gallons of “the Clear.” Stripping him of the MVP will accomplish nothing other than allowing the BBWAA to give themselves a big ethical pat on the back. If we really want Braun to suffer, let the fans do it.
Let them boo him the way Bonds got booed when he went to other ballparks.
Let them write up insulting signs for him to see every time he looks out into the stands.
Let them rip him to shreds on internet message boards for the rest of his career.
Let them make sure he never forgets that he cheated.
That will have a more lasting effect on Braun than him no longer having some shiny trinket on his mantle.
