Arizona Diamondbacks executive Ken Kendrick wants all 104 players who failed an anonymous drug test in 2003 to be identified. Kendrick believes full disclosure would help baseball recover from the mess it’s in.

Part of that mess can be attributed to the owners, who turned a blind eye for years and didn’t want to know about a long-rumored steroid scandal. Kendrick believes those 104 players should take one for the team, even though their exposure is a violation of the collective bargaining agreement that the owners and players took months to negotiate.

Those 2003 tests, which marked the beginning of the drug-testing program, were to be anonymous, and positive tests were not punishable. The first-round of testing was simply an attempt to document the numbers of players who were using performance-enhancing drugs.

For failed tests this old, which were to be anonymous, the 104 players should be protected by the collective bargaining agreement -- and no owner should be suggesting that it be broken.

"I understand the other side of the argument, where privacy rights that are granted, there's a right to protection,” said Kendrick, who doesn’t seem to understand it at all. “But they were doing something that was against the law.”

Kendrick’s personal opinion is that those who broke the law don’t deserve protection under the law. In this case, the “law” is a contract negotiated by his fellow owners, and the 104 players who took tests held up their end of the deal.

Disclosing who the 104 players are doesn’t cleanse baseball. It’s easy for Kendrick and commissioner Bud Selig to express disappointment in Alex Rodriguez, but the scandal happened under Selig’s watch, with rumors circulating for years. Perhaps more than these 104 players should be sacrificed to help repair the game’s image. Do we have any volunteers at the top?