JUPITER, Fla. — The St. Louis Cardinals are the second stop on union chief Don Fehr’s annual tour around the spring training camps. He arrived this morning and as I write this the Cardinals are about halfway through their meeting — which touches on a variety of topics, not the least of which will be the 2003 drug tests that have become more well-known than the union wanted and the slow, slower and slowest free agent market from this past winter.

“Basically what we do is you go over what’s happened over the course of the last year,” Fehr told reporters Monday morning when he made his stop at Florida Marlins camp. “You talk about events of current interest. You try and answer questions. You always go through what happened in the free agent market and salary arbitration. There’s other things which have been of interest like the supplement issue or matters arising with the joint drug program. You talk about internal stuff with the players association.”

Palm Beach Post staff writer Tom D’Angelo, soon to be a Hall of Famer in these parts and the paper’s Cardinals beat writer every spring training, was one of a couple writers Fehr spoke with yesterday. D’Angelo’s story about Fehr’s response to the 103 names and positives tests from 2003 that have yet to become public from is up at the PBPost’s site (“Donald Fehr says union won’t reveal names of 103 players who failed drug test in 2003“).

Some bites from Fehr’s talk yesterday (he’ll speak with the crowd here in a bit) …

On the drug-testing agreement: “I don’t think anything has happened that would suggest the drug agreement is operating at all inappropriately. The commissioner has said repeatedly over the last couple of years to contrary, that everything is just fine.”

On any whispers of collusion this winter: “We hope that there isn’t. We hope that the people that have yet to sign will sign. There have been a number of them in recent days. What we have done at all times since 1985 is we look very hard at the market both on an ongoing basis and after it’s over and we make a judgment. If we conclude that there has been any violation of the contract going on we’ll take action to remedy it. I don’t want to comment on that unless and until we reach that conclusion.”

On whether the 2003 tests could have been destroyed: “What happened in 2003 was that the contract provided explicitly that steps would be taken to destroy the information once the results were finalized and tabulated. That happened the afternoon of a Thursday, the 13 of November. We advised players on Friday. Steps were promptly taken Friday, I think on Monday. This is not an immediate turnaround to do this right away. There are labs, there are samples and there are records. And we were advised on Wednesday that there was a grand jury subpoena. Once that happens you can’t do it.”

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When the meeting is finished — between 9:15 and 9:45 a.m. St. Louis time — the Cardinals will take the field for their final day of workouts before games begin. The main event on the schedule is Chris Carpenter’s second live batting practice. The whole schedule has not been released yet, but there is also expected to be a coach-pitch game featuring many of the major-league players.

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