PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- Though some fans would like to hear the names of all the 104 players who failed anonymous steroid testing in 2003, the Major League Baseball Players Association understandably wants to protect the confidentiality of that testing. And so as union chief Donald Fehr continued his tour of Spring Training camps on Tuesday, he attempted to allay those concerns among players.

"There are confidentiality orders in effect from the courts, and we expect and certainly hope that those orders and those agreements will be upheld," Fehr said.

Fehr spoke to the Mets for a little more than an hour on Tuesday, delivering his annual state of the union address to the fourth of 30 clubs. This year's talk had a bit more substance than usual, largely because it occurred so soon after news broke that Alex Rodriguez had failed his confidential drug test in 2003.

"When you take tests that names are never supposed to come out and that trust is betrayed, that's obviously a concern," Mets third baseman David Wright said. "But the union right now is unified about making sure that we continue to have a solid drug testing program, and that we do weed out all the cheaters and the guys that try to bend the rules."

Fehr said he agreed with Commissioner Bud Selig, who has continually lauded baseball's current drug testing program as one of the toughest in sports. Like all major sports, the next hurdle for baseball is finding a verifiable test for human growth hormone, which currently doesn't exist.

Fehr said he has suggested a process in which manufacturers can "mark" HGH with certain chemicals, thus making it far easier to detect. But he was not optimistic that such a test would become a reality anytime soon.

His more pressing task is to ease the worries of players who are concerned about the confidentiality of the testing, and to defend those in his union from further suspicion.

"The testing results in 2003 demonstrated that the overwhelming majority were not positive," Fehr said. "And with the program we've implemented after that, with the changes that have been made, the incidence of steroid use has dropped not 100 percent off the map, but the next best thing to it. So I think it's really unfair to blame players like that."

Fehr said that the union never really had a chance to destroy the positive samples from the 104 players, as it originally intended, before the government subpoenaed the list. Under the guidelines of the confidential test, the union had to inform all players if more than 5 percent of them tested positive for steroids -- the minimum threshold required for Major League Baseball to implement testing with penalties in 2004, which it ultimately did.

"There's only so much confidentiality you can have when the government gets involved and you have to start following laws," Wright said. "Forget about baseball, forget about the union -- laws are laws. When the government gets involved, you have to follow the rules. I don't think there's anything that was done that wasn't in the players' best interests."