Ryan Braun has successfully appealed a positive drug test, and no 50-game ban will be forthcoming for the National League’s 2011 Most Valuable Player.

And I feel vaguely nauseated.

What creeps me out about this is that Braun and his legal team did not attack the science, they attacked the chain of custody. He beat the rap, at least in the eyes of a three-man panel. He did not prove his innocence.

At issue: The 48 hours that Braun’s urine sample sat in a test-taker’s refrigerator. That is not the preferred way to handle these things. Tester gets a urine sample, turns it over to Fed-Ex and off it goes to the laboratory in Montreal. Same day. Not three days later.

However, sitting in the person’s fridge should not have done anything to the basic chemistry, which apparently showed a sky-high testosterone level.

“You’re not going to grow synthetic testosterone just because it sat in a refrigerator over the weekend,” Travis T. Tygart, the chief of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency told The New York Times.

Now, Ryan Braun will turn up at spring training in Arizona and go about his business as if nothing has happened. Or he will attempt to.

A panel found the test to be flawed. How all that testosterone showed up in his urine … well, we haven’t addressed that, have we.

What makes me vaguely nauseated is the idea that some athletes may feel emboldened to cheat. Something like 15 years of baseball history were seriously compromised by the rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and their juiced-up sham of a home run chase in 1998. Barry Bonds and his ridiculous 73 home runs in 2001. Brady Anderson and the 5o homers he hit in 1996 (a very distant “outlier” in a career in which he never hit more than 24 in any other season).

I do not want to see the game returned to the era that left us all feeling like saps. That felt like Baseball at the Science Fair, seeing who could get the best drugs and perfect their usage. I do not want to see more guys popping out of their uniforms.

This Ryan Braun thing seems like a big step in the wrong direction.

Yes, I would rather deal with the melancholy concept that the MVP cheated and got caught … than I would this return to Not Really Being Certain most of our ballplayers are clean.