MLB Drops Alfonzo’s Existing PED Suspension

According to a baseball source, Major League Baseball has dropped the 100-game suspension levied against Eliezer Alfonzo last season due to the same procedural issues that surfaced during the Ryan Braun case over the offseason.

The specific procedural issues were yet again not specifically outlined in this report, but the important aspect to note is that this was not an appeal case that Alfonzo and his team won. This suspension was not brought before an arbitrator. Instead, Major League Baseball re-examined the procedural facts of the sample collection and simply dropped the suspension.

Alfonzo is a fringe major league player with only 624 plate appearances over six big league seasons. He owns a career .273 wOBA and has recorded a negative WAR in three of his six stints in the majors. The overall impact of this decision on the legacy of Eliezer Alfonzo is minuscule. The 33-year-old catcher may never see another inning with a big league club, especially since the Colorado Rockies already have their wily, veteran catcher in 35-year-old Ramon Hernandez.

This decision to drop Alfonzo’s suspension, however, affects the legitimacy of the appeal won by Ryan Braun over the winter. The procedural deficiencies that were identified during the Braun appeal have clearly been deemed important enough to affect current suspensions without any hearing whatsoever. Thus, the notion that these procedural issues can be written off as a mere technicality and ignored in the public consciousness seems to be more misguided now than ever before.

A little more than 20% into the 2012 season, we see no evidence that Ryan Braun’s numbers from 2011 were abnormal, even if one clings to his purported performance-enhancing drug usage. His wOBA during his MVP campaign in 2011 was .433. His wOBA through 32 games in 2012 is .433. Not to mention, his current .331 ISO is the highest of his six-year career.

Braun continues to endure a chorus of boos in every stadium to which the Brewers travel this year. He is largely seen as a glistening example of a guilty celebrity who got off on a technicality due to shrewd lawyering. The dropping of the Alfonzo suspension suggests, though, that the procedural errors were not insignificant. In fact, they were grounds to retroactively nullify an existing suspension.

This, of course, does not mean that Ryan Braun is innocent. He very well could have taken performance-enhancing drugs. This development with Eliezer Alfonzo, however, continues to highlight the fact that we do not know if Braun used performance-enhancing drugs. Legitimate issues with the testing existed. That should not even be a point of contention any longer. An existing suspension would not have been dropped if the procedural issues were not significant.

And at this point, arguing against the procedural issues and trumpeting the unequivocal guilt of Ryan Braun (and now Eliezer Alfonzo) seems unnecessarily hard-headed.