It may be the strongest union in sports and among the strongest in all of the labor world, but right now the Major League Baseball Players Association is in some big trouble. Not only are the steroid scandals that started this century off still front and center, but now the union itself is becoming a news story.

In the wake of Sports Illustrated’s report that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids during the survey testing of 2003, but also in that same breaking news story was information about Gene Orza that is unacceptable.

Orza, the chief operating officer of the players’ union, was said to have allegedly tipped off a player to upcoming “unannounced” tests. Orza is alleged to have tipped off Rodriguez in September of 2004 of an upcoming test as well.

Now I know that unions are supposed to represent and protect their employees, but this is going a bit far. What Orza allegedly did here is nothing short of criminal.

In many cases, the covering up of a crime is worse than the crime itself (see: Bill Clinton). In this case, Orza was willing to do whatever he needed to do to protect the image of his clients, including covering up their breaking of rules and laws.

If true, this could explain the lack of high-profile positive tests since 2003. If Orza was in fact protecting the marquee players from positive tests, then he was suppressing the evidence that should now exist about some of these players.

Surely there is more to this story still to come out, but in the meantime, we are learning more and more by the hour about how the player’s union operates, and how they may have gone a bit too far in protecting their players.

If the MLBPA is selectively choosing to protect particular individual players from the drug testing program, there will be severe repercussions to this. If this whole mess doesn’t get cleaned up, and cleaned up well, then Donald Fehr and Bud Selig will go down as the two men that, more than anyone else in the world, ruined our National Pastime.

The irony is seeing how quick everyone was to throw Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmiero and Roger Clemens under the bus, but when it comes to baseball’s golden child, the anti-Bonds, the union was going out of it’s way to warn him of upcoming drug tests. Allegedly.

While watching the news unfold on the new and very impressive MLB Network, Harold Reynolds offered some very interesting details about the way the union operated. Reynolds explained how the union basically indoctrinates younger players into believing that the union will always do what’s best for you, and there is no need to ever question it. That belief, in turn, leads to players being completely blindsided by changes that may not be actually beneficial to them, because they had such blind faith in the union.

Perhaps this is the final step needed to strip some of the power from the player’s union, and finally implement some of the things that would be good for baseball and not just good for the player’s and owner’s wallets (ie. salary cap).

Much more on this when SI publishes the complete story later this week. This is major, major news.

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