Here's the good news: with the offseason behind us, it's February, and we're talking about Ryan Braun's defense! Here's the bad news: not that kind of defense.

In the middle of December, at ESPN, T.J. Quinn and Mark Fainaru-Wada broke the story that Ryan Braun had tested positive for a prohibited substance. Now, at the end of February, Quinn and Fainaru-Wada are back to address what's going on. There are big questions, they say, and below please find some excerpts:

It's possible that no one has ever tested that high in baseball, but Don Catlin, the former director for the Olympic lab at UCLA who is considered the father of performance-enhancing drug testing, said he has seen cases that exceeded 100-to-1. A 20-to-1 ratio, he and others said, is not unusual in a positive test.

According to multiple sources with knowledge of the hearing, possible tampering of the specimen was not raised as a defense, and Montreal lab director Christiane Ayotte testified that she saw no signs of tampering when the lab received the specimens.

Give the whole article a read - it's sufficiently different from other articles as to be worth the time. I suspect we'll never know for sure just what happened with Ryan Braun. Now MLB and the union will set to work to make sure this kind of thing never happens again.