Ryan Braun reportedly told teammates that he was clean. He told them that he wasn’t using performance-enhancing drugs, and that this, not what Major League Baseball was accusing him of, was the truth. That was in 2012. They believed him. They supported him.
Fast forward a year and a half. Braun was slapped with a suspension for the rest of the 2013 season Monday for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. Braun’s name has been linked to the Biogensis PED scandal for some time, and the news of Braun’s ban shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. While his Brewers teammates — the same teammates who stood behind him in 2012 when he successfully appealed a suspension — may not be surprised, but they’re reportedly unhappy, too.
Yahoo! Sports baseball writer Jeff Passan reports that Braun’s teammates in Milwaukee are none too pleased with the former MVP.
“The entire thing stunk from the start, through the middle and all the way to the end, when the guy flipped on himself and his Brewers teammates sat there and thought: Good,” Passan wrote Monday night.
“Though no Brewers player expressed as much publicly after Monday’s game,” he later wrote, “their private disappointment dovetails with the sort of embarrassment anyone lied to feels.”
Passan was much more direct in his reporting on Twitter, where he shared what he learned about the Brewers’ reaction to the news.
[tweet https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/359498931962523649 align=’center’]
[tweet https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/359499952466051072 align=’center’]
The disdain for Braun, unsurprisingly, is not exclusive to the Milwaukee clubhouse. ESPN’s Buster Olney has been reporting for a while now that players around the league were hoping for the slugger to go down. They got that wish Monday.
“Many of the other players have been rooting for him to go down, and to go down hard,” Olney wrote. “He may be allowed into the union meetings, he may get union benefits, he may even carry a union card. But most of them will never again regard him as one of them.”
