Vindication?

Editor's Note: I have been convinced by a reader to create a Twitter Account. I have avoided the jump forever but I guess i'll hop on. It is not a personal account it is only related to this blog. I will post random sports things on it besides my blog posts from time to time. If you are interested follow me on twitter @IfItHasBalls. 

So it was a slow sports news week for most of the weeks and now I am rushing to sneak a blog post in on the weekend on you guys. Honestly, without Ryan Braun's arbitration ruling I was going to be stuck making chink in the armor jokes for 10 paragraphs. More on that later. The biggest news this week, and honestly if you follow sports at all it's the biggest news in a long time was Ryan Braun winning his arbitration appeal and having his 50 game suspension lifted. 

Why is this news big? First it's a groundbreaking decision, no player has had his performance enhancing drug usage suspension reduced in this new era of baseball. He's the first. What makes it even bigger is the means to the end and the context in which it occurred. Ryan Braun won his appeal chain of custody grounds, in other words he won on a technicality. To expose my nerdery and quote a line from one of my favorite shows, Futurama, "you are technically correct, the best kind of correct." In case you aren't familiar with the hearing, it has come out that Braun's attorneys focused on the tester's failure to immediately send Braun's urine sample via FedEx to Montreal and instead kept it in his refrigerator or something. Apparently they never even addressed the validity of the positive test, just that the chain of custody was improperly followed. How this decision answered any questions about Ryan Braun is beyond me.

For what it's worth, I'm a big Ryan Braun fan. I think he's a fantastic ballplayer and I was among the most shocked at his positive test, but winning an arbitration hearing on chain of custody grounds in no way addresses why he had such elevated testosterone levels in the test in the first place or what substance was found in his test. Why is this important? I mean after all he was cleared to play and that should be the end of it. When, the context of the decision is important.

Baseball's drug testing system is still in its infancy and is still battling an image that the sport is rife with steroids. For good reason too, baseball intentionally looked the other way for a decade while its players obviously juiced in order to get viewers back following the '94 strike. It worked for a little while and then it blew up in Major League Baseball's face with the Mitchell Report. Now baseball has its premier athletes of the 90s: McGwire, Sosa, Clemens hauled in front of Congress to answer about steroids, and its Home Run King****** (I don't think that's enough asterisks) hauled into Federal court on obstruction of justice charges related to Federal investigations into BALCO. The MLB is now coping with questions relating to the legitimacy of much of its recent history book, hall of fame votes are influenced by drugs, and any time a pro player breaks out (read: Jose Bautista) its an automatic assumption that he's on the juice.

Obviously, baseball has a lot of work to do to recover consumer confidence that its product isn't tainted and that the sport has taken every measure to virtually guarantee the cleanliness of the sport. This was what made the Ryan Braun test so important. Ryan Braun has been held up by the management of his sport as the glowing example of a fantastic talent who doesn't require PEDs and then the world came crashing down. Now while baseball struggles with the legitimacy of its testing, it gets its highest profile case thrown out not because the test was inaccurate but because a guy didnt mail it off in time. Now the decision throws MLB's testing into chaos and they basically have to start from the ground floor in its quest for renewed legitimacy. The final outcome in this saga is harmful for baseball only because of the way it ended. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised either way if he really did or really did not take any banned substances. He's a tiny guy compared to the steroid goliaths of the last decade, but Andy Pettitte used them to speed recovery. Given it was the end of the season when he failed the test, I wouldn't be surprised if he was aching or injured and was trying to get healthy quick for his team's playoff run. Either way, I don't think any questions were really answered and all it led to were more questions regarding baseball's testing.

In other news, the inevitable happened: someone crossed the line with the puns in the ever growing Jeremy Lin story. In case you missed it, a headline writer for the ESPN Mobile service wrote the following headline "Chink in the Armor" following Jeremy Lin's poor performance against New Orleans and then it was repeated by an ESPNews anchor on TV. If you don't get the pun, "chink" is a derogatory term used to describe an Asian person. Honestly, I find the whole situation hilarious.

First, besides your freedom of speech what compels you to use that headline? You work for a U.S. media conglomerate that has to respond to whims of the masses no matter if it thinks the masses are right or not. Why would you think that headline would fly on ESP freaking N. Someone is going to see it. Someone is going to get it. Someone is going to call the FCC and your boss at ESPN on you. Moron. The ESPNews anchor is probably just a Ron Burgundy clone and reads whatever was printed on the teleprompter.

Second, I think it's hilarious that the Asian American Journalist Association released a "How To" guide on reporting on Jeremy Lin. People can say what they want and they face the repercussions, but one journalist group telling another journalist group how to write its story is ludicrous.

Third, I'd like to believe that I live in 21st century America where we no longer fear that usage of derogatory terms towards different races will set a certain group of people back centuries. If a stand up comedian used that line most of us would laugh. Don't be a ashamed, that's the point. These terms are so ridiculous in modern speak that they should be laughed at.

Should the headline writer have been fired and the anchor suspended? Sure. Companies like ESPN have to deal with irrational consumers and so they have to walk on eggshells. But we do live in the United States of America in the 21st century, where talent will always win out. So the usage of this phrase is not going to belittle Jeremy Lin's accomplishments or create a glass barrier to more Asian American basketball players. Words are only given the power that we give them. If a headline incorporates redneck, or whitey, or cracker, or something I'll probably laugh and move on. They are simply words and in this day and age they wield such little power. Learn a lesson here and lets move on and not throw our hands up outrage every time we see one.

As it turns out we are in fact seeing a chink in Lin's armor (see what I did there?). He does not hold up well on the second game in back to backs. In his last four second games (Minnesota, Sacramento, New Jersey, Miami)  he has performed statistically worse. It's not unexpected, you have a guy go from little NBA experience in his first two seasons to 40 minutes a game in a meat grinder season with limited days off. He's going to get tired. But so is Kyrie Irving and Ricky Rubio and they seem to be doing fine and they've played the whole season. I think the media circus is what is really weighing on him. News came out that hes renting some high rise apartment in a hotel and when trying to eat at the downstairs bar and grill he was mobbed. He hasn't had a normal life for an NBA player for 3 weeks and he has no experience dealing with the circus. It will subside, but it will never be the same for him. The quicker he gets used to it the better off he'll be.

He's a fine player in this system and those looking for him to fail will probably be disappointed. He is settling into his 14/10 role which is all New York needs him to be to be a dangerous team. The playoffs will be fascinating, but its not out of question for New York to cover the 5 game deficit needed to pass Indiana for a home court advantage in the first round.

One last thing: Tiger Woods needs to go to Happy Gilmore's school of putting. His display in the 4th round of the Pro-Am at Pebble Beach was disgusting. In the second round of the match play championship this week he was down 1 hole on the 18th and after nailing a 180 yard second shot, he had a 6 foot putt to win the hole and send it to extra holes. He didn't even get close. He's become the anti-clutch. It's like he's getting rattled by the heartbeat like players do in his video game. I don't know that we've ever seen a guy who was so clutch in his sport like Michael Jordan or Mariano Rivera all of the sudden become a quivering mess when the chips are down. He has rediscovered his stroke and he is playing the best golf of the last 3 years but he isn't Tiger Woods yet. I'm starting to wonder if he ever will be again.