ST. LOUIS — The stink of baseball's steroid scandal is a moving feast of dubious distinction that continues to taint everyone and everything in its path. From the surly home run king to the awkwardly apologetic slugger, from the belligerent superstar pitcher to the do-little commissioner who waited until the stench was stronger than a toxic dump on his front porch, it certainly seemed as though Major League Baseball had all its ignominious bases covered.

Or so we thought.

Now it has gotten even worse.

Golden boy Alex Rodriguez, who so many baseball devotees prayed would eventually provide the ultimate legitimate fresh scent to baseball's scandal-soiled home-run records, apparently has the big steroid stink on him, too.

In an online report released on Saturday morning, Sports Illustrated claims that Rodriguez, arguably the best player in baseball, tested positive in 2003 for two anabolic steroids. This is another one of those punch-in-the-gut moments in sports because A-Rod was being packaged as the guy who would save baseball from its steroid shame. Well, welcome to the Liars Club, A-Rod, and take a seat next to Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens. The room's getting a little crowded, but I think we can find you a chair.

So now Rodriguez's life story has become just one more of those annoying athletic tales reeking with disgust and disappointment. Eventually, he's going to talk about this, and he'll surely try to cloak his guilt behind a bunch of well-rehearsed lines written by image-salvaging publicists. But there are no words that will make him any better than Bonds or Clemens or any of the other men who were born with God-given gifts to play baseball at extraordinary human levels, but cheated their way to mind-boggling, video-game career numbers.

I get more perturbed when confronted by gifted men like this, who didn't have to cheat to be great, but did anyway either for insatiable greed, blind ambition or some deeper, darker issues of self-esteem. Every time I see one more superstar who took an illegal shortcut, I want to throw up a bigger barricade around the Cooperstown city limits.

I am starting to suffer from steroid fatigue, worn out and numbed by the damage that the cheaters do to sports. But stories like this also give me a stronger appreciation for true greatness and a growing resolve to protect and preserve it.

I am still a few years away from qualifying for my Hall of Fame vote, but the privilege will come with a purpose.

If you stink of steroids, you will not get my vote.

Period.

I don't want to hear about how they all were doing it, or how hard it will be to know which ones should get in and which ones shouldn't. I don't want to hear anything about how the pitchers were juicing and the hitters were juicing so it all evens out in the end.

No it doesn't. Not everyone was cheating and not everyone felt like they were being forced to use illegal drugs to keep up.

Men like Frank Robinson, Henry Aaron, Stan Musial, Bob Gibson and so many others who are in baseball's Hall of Fame got there on their own physical merits, and didn't need a chemist's magical potion to give them a boost.

Baseball's image has suffered immeasurable harm by this scandal, and the concept of swinging the doors at Cooperstown wide open to Bonds, McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Clemens or A-Rod — or worse yet, the silly notion of quarantining them in their own "steroids era" wing — and turning the cheats into baseball immortals — is just plain stupid.

I vow not to have any part of that.

I have too much respect for the abilities of Robinson and Aaron, Musial and Gibson, Ted Williams and Cool Papa Bell and the rest of this special fraternity to allow the cheaters to occupy the same hallowed territory. But there is another shame to this game that might be lost in the fine print of that Sports Illustrated expose. Baseball's players association — which has long been the gold standard for all professional sports players unions — has been exposed.

Once I thought the MLBPA was guilty of nothing more harmful than righteous obstruction. Executive director Donald Fehr and his righthand man Gene Orza have always tried to take the moral high ground on their fight to keep drug testing out of baseball. They kept preaching that this was a high-minded battle to preserve civil liberties, and whether you agreed with them or not, you at least had to admire their tenacity.

But now we find out that Orza, the chief operating officer of the union, is being accused of violating an agreement with MLB by tipping off Rodriguez of an upcoming random drug test in September of 2004. Orza was named in the '07 Mitchell Report, which said that he had tipped off an unnamed player of an unannounced drug test, and now there are players who are backing up the claim. If this is true, then Orza is a liar and much worse.

It means he was either trying to rig the results of those "surveys" to protect the entire flock of drug cheats in baseball or he was seeking to individually protect A-Rod's high-profile hide.

If I am a member of the players association who doesn't use performance-enhancing drugs (and I do believe that is a substantial, though inexplicably silent majority), this would disturb me greatly. Instead of trying to rid baseball of designer drugs, your union was actively keeping the drug era alive and prospering.

And if I am a member of the players union who was one of those 104 who tested positive to those anonymous tests in '03, yet thought my identity was protected, I'd certainly like to know why my urine samples were never destroyed.

Either way, it means that Orza and Fehr can no longer be trusted, and that spells trouble for baseball's most powerful men.

What happens now, when the tie that bound the union together for so long — unquestioned and unshakable trust — is now exposed as a flimsy sham?