There are few people I would less like to be over the next few months than Donald Fehr, the director of baseball’s players union. Yesterday, Fehr agreed, again, to reopen the sport’s labor contract.

Two years ago, in a fit of moralist fervor, Congress demanded that the union open its labor contract to implement a new drug policy, one tilting toward management demands. Fehr agreed. Now, with the steroid report from a former Senate majority leader, George Mitchell, in hand, Congress is yet again demanding that the union make changes in a settled contract — this time to fix supposed holes in the same drug policy it insisted the sport adopt to begin with. Sunday, Rep. Bobby Rush, a Democrat of Illinois, even announced he will introduce legislation based on Mitchell’s recommendations.

The problem for Fehr is that Congress increasingly seems to be acting like an arm of the commissioner’s office. It is, for instance, allowing Mitchell, a longtime member of baseball management, to essentially dictate laws affecting the sport’s labor contract. Baseball is hardly all-powerful on Capitol Hill; if it were up to Commissioner Bud Selig, Congress would doubtless not be scheduling hearings and drafting drug testing laws. Still, while senators may fight for the chance to deride Selig when the cameras are on, when it’s time to cut a deal, their role is basically to tell the players to take what Selig gives them and like it.

It should be noted here that central baseball spends a lot of money in Washington. Last year, according to figures available from the Center for Responsive Politics, baseball executives and the sport’s political action committee gave $41,000 to just one senator, Jon Kyl, a Republican of Arizona. The Democratic Party’s Senatorial and Congressional Campaign committees and the Democratic National Committee got $350,000. And baseball spent tens of millions on the drug investigation, which was carried out by DLA Piper, a firm that numbers among its partners not only Mitchell, but former House majority leaders Richard Armey and Richard Gephardt.

This would be a lot of power for anyone to face, but Fehr doesn’t even have public opinion on his side. Baseball may be making more money than ever, but people are disgusted by the sport and are hardly likely to feel any sympathy for players.

The one good thing about the Mitchell report, though, is that it opens political space. It is clear that baseball’s drug policy has failed. Mitchell’s solution is to test for more substances more invasively, to scrutinize players and their associations more closely, and to investigate them more aggressively. He wants to maintain the failed policy, but make it work better.

Perhaps, though, the problem is that this is just the same old solution that always fails, whether it’s being applied to alcohol or forbidden books. Perhaps we need another solution entirely. And perhaps providing one would allow Fehr to define the terms in this next round of negotiations.

Baseball’s drug policy is a failure not because it hasn’t stamped out drug use (that’s impossible) or because it’s allowed a huge amount of drug use (it hasn’t), but because it hasn’t reassured the public or Congress that the sport is doing everything it can to stay clean. But if it continues on its present course, it never will. If baseball solves the problem of human growth hormone, it will have to deal with blood doping. And after that it will be something else.

There are ways out of all this, though. Consider the idea of a second tier of testing. Under this scheme, baseball would maintain its present testing program and also create a second, entirely voluntary system, conforming entirely to the exacting international doping standards that Mitchell and Rush admire and that have kept the Olympics and bicycling so clean.

Players would have the choice of taking only the general tests or of taking the more rigorous ones as well. And — here is the thing that would make it work — players choosing to take the voluntary tests would remain anonymous unless they chose otherwise. No player could be assumed to be dodging the stricter testing. A player like Alex Rodriguez could, though, announce that he’s opted into what might be called the Mitchell Plan rather than announcing that he’s clean on “60 Minutes.”

An approach like this would orient drug policy around incentives, rather than punishment. Free agents, for instance, would have incentives to announce participation in the Mitchell Plan because it would give them an edge over players unwilling to make a similar claim. Stars seeking endorsement deals would have similar reason to participate. And any player sick of being tarred as a drug user would have a way to prove themselves clean.

Crucially, though, this wouldn’t stigmatize players who declined to participate. They would, after all, be anonymous, and still subject to the present testing regime. Even if an overwhelming mass of major leaguers both agreed voluntarily to the stricter testing and decided to announce that they had done so, forming a critical mass of avowedly clean ballplayers, those who declined would hardly be blackballed. After all, marginal players like Guillermo Mota and Jose Guillen were able to land good contracts after testing positive or being tied to drug dealers, and Barry Bonds’s bankroll was hardly harmed by his various scandals.

Maybe this idea, or something similar, would work; maybe it wouldn’t. Baseball’s union desperately needs to present a new idea, though, if it wants to do anything other than perpetuate a policy that will lead to nothing more than the repetition of a cycle of hysteria, followed by pressure, followed by capitulation. If nothing else, Mitchell’s report proved what a tangled knot this problem is; Fehr, or someone, needs to cut it.

tmarchman@nysun.com