Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) have been heavily involved in the baseball Biogenesis scandal that this week resulted in 13 suspensions to go along with the rest-of-the-season ban for Milwaukee Brewers slugger Ryan Braun.
The Florida lab that apparently supplied various performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to a number of athletes has been under heavy fire and legal scrutiny, and now just an affiliation with the company has brought down the curtain on 14 players’ seasons.
Only one, Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, is able to appeal his ban, which he has done with arbitrator Frederic Horowitz.
Ah, the Joys of Being Social with Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY)!
The story goes that the players who have been swept up in the Biogenesis scandal were nailed by some damning circumstantial evidence since there was no record of any of the players failing any drug tests for known PEDs. Ronald Blum of the Associated Press reported that an “electronic trail” of various Facebook posts and BlackBerry Messenger chat transcripts were followed and traced back to these players and their involvement with the Biogenesis lab, which had apparently engineered some PEDs that could not be detected by current testing methods adopted by Major League Baseball.
Commissioner Bud Selig was able to provide this evidence to each of the players and their representatives, and was able to convince 12 of them to accept 50-game suspensions without the possibility of appeal. Braun could have appealed but decided to take his suspension now and end his 2013 season since the Brewers are having to take to hard liquor to finish this dreadful season.
Rodriguez, on the other hand, has appealed his 211-game suspension, and will continue playing until his appeal is decided upon, which may not come until after this season is over. The Yankees, somehow, are still in some kind of playoff chase at this point, which likely explains why Rodriguez is appealing. It makes more sense for him than for Braun.
As these are their own form of legal proceedings, we do not know what Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) posts or BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) Messenger chat messages tipped off the MLB investigators to the connection with Biogenesis, but apparently there were enough dots to connect that MLB had several people working full-time on this investigation, finding connections in social media with the lab and the players and tracing back histories and comments – perhaps even phrases or keywords – to track the information so that MLB could make its case to the players.
The Genesis of Biogenesis
This “electronic trail” that was generated through Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) messages and posts certainly opened up a new avenue to catch cheaters, according to Daivd Prouty, chief counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), the players’ union. “It both complicates things and adds a layer of proof that certainly wasn’t available many years ago.”
Players like Jhonny Peralta and others were drawn into the budding scandal when the Miami New Times alternative newspaper wrote an expose about Biogenesis and its connections to prominent professional athletes and PEDs. The story broke in January, and it didn’t take long before MLB started snooping around.
And without any positive drug tests on record – Braun had one positive test in 2012 overturned on a technicality – the league had to come up with more unconventional means to gather “positive” results from the players who were implicated. Maybe MLB took a chance that these players were ego-centric enough to tout their performance, at the same time willing to forward word-of-mouth guidance to friends and teammates in the game for ways to improve their future contracts by jacking up better stats.
Whatever it was, being social just cost these players the rest of this season. And for some of them, perhaps theire careers. Should Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Thorsten Heins be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for the contributions of their companies to the integrity of baseball?
While there may be a case, the roles these companies played can certainly not be ignored by fund managers invested in these companies, like Leon Cooperman and Jim Simons. But for those players who really don’t quite understand the power of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), allow Ellen DeGeneres to provide evidence in the video clip below.
America is in grave danger, extremely vulnerable to black swan events that strike out of the blue, that throw the world into turmoil, and that raise the specter of even darker black swans still to come.
Like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, decimating an independent democracy larger than Germany and the UK combined, reducing its cities to rubble, sending shock waves through the global economy.
Or a massive future air attack on the independent democracy of Taiwan, igniting a new war in the South China Sea, spreading to the entire Pacific region, plunging East-West trade into turmoil.
How much damage could just one of these black swans cause?
For an answer, let’s not forget the black swans that have struck our nation since the beginning of the new millennium:
The black swan that attacked the very heart of our nation on 9-11 with great loss of life and treasure, setting off a chain reaction of events that have continued to ricochet through time:
The U.S. invasion of Iraq, the fall of Saddam Hussein, the rise of Al Qaeda, the global spread of the Islamic state, and then …
Billions of dollars in new money printing by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Or the black swan that attacked the very heart of our economy.
It wasn’t September 11th, 2001.
It was September 15th, 2008 — the Lehman Brothers failure, again, setting off a chain reaction of events that have continued to ricochet through time:
America’s deepest recession since the 1930s.
America’s largest bank failures and bailouts of all time. And then …
A massive wave of central bank money printing that was many times larger than anything we’d ever seen before.
“A massive and surprising new transition could determine the next group of millionaires,” says Chaikin, who predicted the 2020 market crash. “While leaving 99% of the public worse off than before.”
“If you own regular stocks, you’re in for a big surprise,” he adds.
“I grew up in a world where you could do extremely well by investing in ordinary companies,” Chaikin says. “It’s how I spent the majority of my 50-year career on Wall Street.
