A's owner Lew Wolff defended Commissioner Bud Selig and said that the players association should be held to a higher level of responsibility for past steroid use in baseball.

"It's the idea that Bud Selig is constantly being berated for this that gets to me," Wolff told columnist Mark Purdy in the San Jose Mercury News. "It's blatantly unfair and I'm tired of it. A union that 'protects' its people from taking tests for steroids ... I don't get the logic behind it. Bud is being treated unfairly. It doesn't mean he's 100 percent right or wrong. But the thing is, he had to do it practically on his own in the beginning."

Wolff pointed to the fact that Selig unilaterally instituted a drug-testing program in the Minor Leagues prior to the 1998 season -- the same year in which Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in a home run race in which both surpassed Roger Maris' record of 61 home runs, with McGwire finishing with 70.

But Selig couldn't do the same at the Major League level because that required collective bargaining with the players union. An agreement in 2002 led to testing in 2004, after more than five percent of the players returned positive results in survey testing in 2003.

"There's one thing I don't think enough people realize about Bud," Wolff said. "He knows that baseball is the players. Whether he reacted soon enough to the steroid situation or not, once he did react, it was still a fight with the union. And it shouldn't have been a fight. If there's anybody who puts baseball first, it's Bud. And I don't say this just because I went to school with him."

Wolff and Selig were fraternity brothers at the University of Wisconsin.

Wolff, who purchased the A's in April 2005, also took issue with the union's view of testing being a privacy issue rather than one of health.

"I would say to them that this should not be an issue of 'protecting' someone from doing something that could harm them," he said. "I don't get it. I would say that idea is totally backwards. Anything that could hurt a player's health or hurt baseball, the union should be initiating it. It shouldn't be an argument between owners and union. There's plenty of other things to argue about, not the health of the players."

A former A's player, Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley, expressed similar opinions last week to Sports Illustrated.

"Part of me wants to blame it on the union," Eckersley said. "You hear all this stuff about Bud Selig, but look what we had to go through to get the union to even allow testing. If the union would have tested earlier, this probably would all be behind us."