Feel kind of stupid, don’t you?

Last year, when Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun was cleared of a suspension from a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs due to a shipping delay in the test verification process, my Facebook news feed was filled with friends talking smack to Major League Baseball, immediately standing up for Braun’s innocence. An innocence based upon a scientifically invalid wait of two days in transporting a urine sample. Braun himself trumpeted that innocence in a now-infamous news conference where he stated “The system worked because I was innocent and I was able to prove my innocence.”

If one of our own is accused of cheating, we cannot believe the news is true. Like finding out your son cheated on a test, hearing that Wisconsin’s star baseball player cheated his game makes us stand up for that person in our “family.”

Braun lied. You may well have bought the lie, or chose not to believe what was likely the truth. Why?

Being a fan means putting on blinders to negative news about your favorite team or player. If your team fails to make the top five in a ranking, that person doing the ranking must be an idiot, no matter how many factors back up that hypothetical ranking. I ask myself whether I would have had a similar “forget the facts” response if the person suspended was the star of my favorite team: the Twins’ Joe Mauer; I may well have. We are all a fan of some team, after all.

Fandom is, in a way, like family: We care and almost love our organization and our guys, and will be quick to defend them when they have been slighted. If one of our own is accused of cheating, we cannot believe the news is true. Like finding out your son cheated on a test, hearing that Wisconsin’s star baseball player cheated his game makes us stand up for that person in our “family.” As soon as Braun’s test was thrown out, our instinct was to say “We told you so! Our Brauny would never do that!”

But Braun did do that, and he is now suspended without pay for the remainder of the season. Indications that evidence against Braun was powerful-enough to firmly send him away from the ballpark for a long period of time had grown much stronger in recent weeks, with hints coming that big names would come under punishment from the Biogenesis scandal. Even so, earlier in July – shortly after the first widespread word in the media that Braun was clearly caught red-handed and deemed guilty – video from a Brewers game at Miller Park showed a partial standing ovation when Braun took his first turn at the plate. Standing applause for someone we almost certainly knew had wronged the game of baseball. Bravo.

Granted, most in the crowd remained seated. Fandom’s narrow focus does have its limits. My Facebook news feed the day of Braun’s season-ending suspension consisted more of what one would hope to be the reaction: disappointment.  

Ryan Braun let us down. He gave us one of the most legendary moments in Wisconsin baseball history: his game-winning home run in the final game of the 2008 regular season to clinch the Brew Crew’s first playoff berth in 26 years. You wonder if that home run was juiced. You wonder if, had Braun been clean, the Brewers would have lost that game and stayed home that October. The 2011 team – the one with the most victories in Brewers history – may have been powered by drugs. Again, we are left to reach back to 1982 to find good, clean Brewers nostalgia.

Memories have been stained before: Try being wistful about the steroid-laden 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Many, many players have used PEDs beyond those caught by the testing system; Realistically, Milwaukee never had a definitive unfair advantage over their fellow National League teams in the Braun era. Braun’s black mark is a big deal because of his MVP-caliber talent and the success he brought to his downtrodden franchise, and because he used us to keep his image clean. For a change, we had a Wisconsin baseball player we could be proud of; to hear that this was an illusion did not compute.

Ryan Braun said in that 2012 briefing that he was by no means perfect. None of us are – even us fans.