ESPN looks back at Ryan Braun's PED suspension, including the teammate's name he used as a pseudonym

Ten years after Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun was suspended 65 games for his ties to a Florida clinic distributing performance-enhancing substances, ESPN senior writer Mike Fish revisited the saga with his story, "DEA documents show how Braun built Biogenesis doping defense."

ESPN studied a number of documents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, part of an investigation titled "Operation Strikeout." Tony Bosch, the founder of disgraced clinic Biogenesis, worked with many pro athletes who were subsequently suspended for performance-enhancing drug use. Bosch himself ultimately cooperated with Major League Baseball.

Braun wasn't the highest-profile athlete in the scandal; that would be Álex Rodríguez, who was eventually suspended for the entire 2014 season. Rodriguez was given his own feature as part of the 10-story ESPN series "The Biogenesis Files." But Braun's story offered twists and turns that made it a national story and certainly a massive one in Milwaukee, starting when MLB announced in December of 2011 that Braun had tested positive for a banned substance.

Braun's former University of Miami teammate, Marcelo Albir, served as a liaison between Braun and Bosch, and the story features several texts between Albir and Bosch.

Neither Braun nor Albir responded to requests for comment from ESPN, but Albir's previous interviews with federal agents indicated that Braun first contacted Albir after an injury early in 2011 "to see whether the cream was still as effective as he had previously stated."

From the ESPN story referencing notes from Albir's interview, Albir told agents that Braun was aware the "gummies" Albir purchased on Braun's behalf contained low doses of testosterone, and the "cream" contained human growth hormone.

Perhaps the strangest nugget in the story is Albir said he was instructed to mail the cream to Braun under the name Shaun Marcum. At the time, Albir thought that was a pseudonym and only later learned that it was the actual name of Braun's Brewers teammate, a pitcher acquired before the 2011 season who threw 200 innings as a key member of Milwaukee's rotation.

Marcum also didn't respond to ESPN. In another text exchange, Albir directed a shipment be sent to the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee.

Braun's urine sample was collected after Game 1 of the National League Division Series in 2011, a 4-1 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks. In December, ESPN reported that Braun had tested positive for elevated testosterone.

The 2011 season was huge for Braun, in which he won the National League Most Valuable Player and signed a five-year contract extension. That deal expired in 2020, the last year of Braun's MLB career.

More: Ryan Braun said he discussed 'multiple times' coming back to play for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2021

Though the story doesn't offer any stunning new details about Ryan Braun's defense of the initial suspension, it does cover some memorable ground.

Braun gave a now-infamous press conference Feb. 24, 2012, trumpeting his successful appeal.

"By no means am I perfect, but if I've ever made any mistakes in my life, I've taken responsibility for my actions," Braun said then. "I truly believe in my heart and I would bet my life that this substance never entered my body at any point."

Arbitrator Shyam Das sided with Braun's camp, buying the argument that sample collector Dino Laurenzi had failed to follow chain-of-command protocol, wrongly storing the sample at Laurenzi's home for 44 hours before getting shipped via FedEx to the major-league testing lab in Montreal. MLB severed ties with Das less than three months later.

"Basically, everything was against the guy," Bosch told ESPN of the attacks launched on the collector. "The guy was as innocent as innocent can be."

Das's ruling temporarily absolved Braun, but once Bosch began cooperating, Braun was again suspended in July 2013 for the final 65 games of the season, and this time, he accepted the outcome.

"I made a mistake — a huge mistake that has obviously been extremely difficult to deal with and will continue to be difficult to deal with," Braun said in 2013. "All I can say is, in making mistakes, as I’ve stated previously, we all deal with adversity. We all deal with challenges in life. Any challenge you face, you have an opportunity to view as either an obstacle or as an opportunity to grow from, to learn from and to help other people avoid making that same mistake, and that’s what I intend to do."

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: ESPN looks back at Ryan Braun's PED suspension in Biogenesis series