Because he didn't actually test positive for a banned substance, Rodriguez is what MLB has taken to calling, euphemistically, a "non-analytic positive." The designation is an important one. In this case, it moves the matter of discipline beyond the Joint Drug Agreement's clear delineations for players who've tested positive for a "Performance Enhancing Substance"—50-game suspension for the first violation; 100-game suspension for the second; permanent suspension for the third—and into the purest whim of the commissioner.
Alex Rodriguez, to be clear, wasn't suspended because anyone could prove he did anything; he was suspended because there was good reason to think he wanted or tried to do something. He was convicted, in other words, of a thoughtcrime.
This was always going to happen. By laying out what's allowable and unallowable, testing creates the conditions for its own subversion, which serves as proof that testing isn't working, and so requires the testing regime to be given new tools beyond actual testing for proscribed chemistry—the use of inferences and suspicious patterns of behavior as evidence, for example. An agreement to submit to testing is always a decision to go crashing down the slippery slope.
At its bottom you find the sorts of things that central baseball and, apparently, arbitrator Frederic Horowitz have now found in the agreement between baseball and the players. In their reading, it presents a system in which paid witnesses are deemed so reliable that their claims don't need to be verified, in which bad intentions are the same as bad acts, and in which—clearly contrary to spirit of the deal and even to the nature of doping regimens—uses of particular substances can be treated as isolable offenses, each subject to its own penalty.
