Michael Weiner, chief of the baseball players’ union, sounded a bit incredulous when I told him why I was calling.

“You want to write about me doing my job?” he asked.

Well, yes, because this is not about a guy doing his job in ordinary circumstances. This is the story of a man exerting an extraordinary effort in the most trying time of his life in the most grueling part of his work year.

Weiner typically dismissed such seeming melodramatics, but consider the circumstances. He is immersed in the executive director’s annual tour of 30 spring training camps, which this spring will be extended by two round trips between Arizona and Florida for the World Baseball Classic.

The 51-year-old Weiner plans to do it all despite the malignant brain tumor that is lodged inoperably in his head. It is not just any brain tumor; it is the worst kind, a glioblastoma, the kind that killed Dan Quisenberry, Dick Howser, Johnny Oates, John Vukovich, Tug McGraw, Ken Brett, Bobby Bonds, Bobby Murcer and Gary Carter.

Weiner was diagnosed last August and has continued running the union on a daily, in-the-office basis despite periodic treatments of radiation and chemotherapy, maintaining a positive and optimistic outlook. He said he never considered reducing his spring schedule or not making the tour at all, letting other union executives meet with players in his place.

“My attitude has been schedule the whole thing,” Weiner said from one of his Florida stops last week, “including time for the World Baseball Classic, visits and appearances, and then if I don’t feel up to it, we’ll make adjustments. We’re a week into it and I feel good. I’m strong.”

Donald Fehr, Weiner’s predecessor, made the spring tour for 32 years, from 1978 through 2009, and understands why Weiner wouldn’t consider missing it or even curtailing it.

“The spring training tour is at one and the same time the single most important thing the executive director does,” Fehr said, “because it allows him to speak to and answer questions from the entire membership. I can’t stress how important it is. Having said that, any time you’re spending four, five weeks on the road, staying in hotels, in addition to the WBC, it’s a grind. It becomes taxing.”

A typical spring training day for Weiner:

He and the staff members who accompany him arrive at a site an hour or so before the scheduled start (8 a.m. to 9 a.m.) of the meeting with the team and chat informally with players, answering particular questions and addressing concerns they may have regarding themselves. They will do the same for however long after the meeting players have questions.

During the general meeting Weiner brings players up to date on developments that affect them generally. The meetings are much more significant leading up to negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement so Weiner hasn’t had to deal with that aspect since the 2011 tour.

However, these days steroids and other performance-enhancing substances and Major League Baseball’s testing for them are a major topic of discussion and very likely occupy the bulk of the meetings.

Fehr has often been blamed for refusing to agree to a testing program, but as long ago as Marvin Miller, no matter what union critics might claim, union leaders are guided by the players and their desires or demands.

If the players speak up on a subject, the executive leader listens.

It was when the players who didn’t cheat began clamoring for a way to distinguish them from the cheaters that union leaders responded.

Now players have raised the issue of enacting harsher penalties for positive tests, making it a topic of discussion at Weiner’s meetings. It’s possible that when his meetings are concluded he and his management counterpart, Rob Manfred, may find reason to increase the 50-game suspension for a first positive test as a deterrent.

To think that once upon a time the prime topic of concern discussed at spring meetings was meal money.

Whatever the topics are, Weiner covers them and answers any questions about them players may have. Before it is over, Weiner has had a pretty full morning.

When he is finished with the players’ post-meeting questions, he steps outside the clubhouse and answers questions from reporters, who over the years have awakened to the importance of keeping up with developments instead of dismissing them as unimportant.

In that regard, the tour’s early meetings are more important because Weiner is asked and answers the same questions he will face as he continues to make his rounds.

For example, after his first meeting, with the New York Mets in Port St. Lucie, Weiner told reporters “there is a lot of talk in the clubhouse about where we should be on the joint drug program, and that’s a good thing,” adding, “Players understand it’s important to have the strongest program possible, and given both the testosterone changes and the HGH changes, they’re very much for it.”

A few days later, after meeting with the Toronto Blue Jays in Dunedin, he told reporters the two sides were actively discussing an increase in the penalties for next year. He said players have expressed interest in making them more severe.

Players, Weiner added, have very little patience for seeing players try to cheat the system.

“In some ways it’s a grind,” Weiner acknowledged in our telephone conversation. “My doctors and my pseudo doctors – Diane,” his wife – “have warned me about getting enough breaks and not spending too much time on my feet. I’ve done that, but it’s very energizing to me being with players, both to get their expressions of concern for my situation and to get one on one with players and get their views. It can be tiring and I have to watch it. But it’s great.”

Asked what the players’ reaction has been, Weiner said, “Some may be surprised seeing me; a couple guys said they weren’t sure I was going to make it but were glad to see me.”

And what does he do about his cancer while he is in Florida and Arizona? During the past six months he has followed a regimen of treatment and time off, and he has continued that pattern during his tour.

“I have 5 days of intensive chemo and take medication for 23 days that I take all the time,” he said. “In the middle of the trip I will go to New York to see the doctor” – that will be March 11 – “and assuming everything is OK, the scan shows standardization, we will go to the next round of chemo.”

His last scan, a magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, Weiner said, was in early February and “showed some effectiveness in reducing the tumor. That’s why we go ahead with chemo. We’ve been making steady progress, first with radiation and now with chemo.”

The peril of a glioblastoma is it can be misleading. A few years ago Murcer, the former Yankees’ star, appeared to be faring well as a result of clinical trials at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, but his seeming progress stopped suddenly, and his condition quickly deteriorated.

Meanwhile, Weiner continues visiting one camp after another. This weekend, after a pension committee meeting in Sarasota Friday, he had an 8:30 a.m. meeting Saturday with the Tampa Bay Rays in Port Charlotte on the west coast of Florida and an 8:00 a.m. session Sunday with the Baltimore Orioles in Sarasota.

“I really haven’t had that kind of problem,” he said when I asked him if he got tired. “I make sure I get some down time at the end of each day. So far I haven’t had that kind of weariness. If it turns out there are things I can’t do I won’t do them. Later on we have off days built in. My expectations are I’ll be able to do the whole trip.”

Then he offered a thought that had struck him. “It occurred to me,” he said, “when Marvin started doing this, there were 20 teams; now there are 30. Thirty is different than 20.”

Fehr said Weiner never talked to him about the tour before he embarked on it this year. Nor did he expect him to.fehr

“He did not speak to me, but I can’t imagine he wouldn’t do it unless there’s a good reason,” Fehr said. “He seems to be doing all right. How can you do anything but live your life? He’s still functioning. When he stops, he’s prepared to do something. I can’t imagine him wanting to do it any other way.”

Then, referring to Weiner’s home in the middle of New Jersey, Fehr added, “He’s going to be as close to the doctors and the hospital as he would be in Hackettstown. I trust Mike’s judgment on everything, including this.”

Weiner’s last meeting is scheduled for March 27 with the Seattle Mariners in Peoria, Ariz.

Prior to that final meeting, Weiner will finish with a flourish, holding two sessions a day for five days in the final week, one session at 8:30 a.m., the other at 2:30 p.m.

Before he reaches that finish line, though, Weiner has this itinerary:

• March 5 – Fly from Florida to Arizona for WBC games March 7, 8 and 9
• March 9 – Fly from Arizona to New Jersey
• March 11 – Fly from New Jersey to Florida
• March 12 and13 – WBC games
• March 16 – Fly from Florida to San Francisco
• March 17,18,19 – WBC championship round
• March 20 – Fly from San Francisco to Arizona

During that process, Weiner will accumulate a lot of frequent flyer miles.

TO SHARE OR NOT TO SHARE

The latest steroids scandal has cooled down while a newspaper editor ponders a critical decision.

Major League Baseball last month asked the weekly Miami New Times to share the documents that were leaked to the paper. The files purportedly are a record of distribution to major league players of illegal substances by a now closed Coral Gables, Fla., anti-aging clinic.

“At this exact moment,” Chuck Strouse, the newspaper’s editor, said last week, “the answer is no, we have made no decision. We haven’t spoken to baseball in the last few days. I hope we come to something in the next few days.” But Strouse added candidly, “I said that on Monday.”

It doesn’t say much for M.L.B. to be asking a newspaper for help in its investigation of steroids use. Without help from government prosecutors, baseball would never have had its 2007 Mitchell report. Kirk Radomski, a steroids salesman, agreed to give George Mitchell’s men information against players so he could avoid prosecution.

When are baseball’s investigators going to investigate and do their own work? If there is anything incriminating to be found out there, baseball isn’t likely to find it by asking a newspaper or similar source for assistance.

And if Strouse were to decide to share Tony Bosch’s alleged records, what’s in it for him and his newspaper? A couple of box seats for a Marlins game? Now that would surely do the trick.

JEFFREY SAD SACK

Speaking of the Marlins – and their fans may be better off not speaking of them – in the past three decades or so, Major League Baseball has had some club owners who have been dreadful examples of people you wouldn’t want running the team you root for. Vince Naimoli of Tampa Bay, George Argyros of Seattle and Marge Schott of Cincinnati readily come to mind.

Where does Jeffrey Loria of Miami fit? Despite having won the World Series in 2003 (Schott won in 1990), Loria has been a sad sack of an owner, scrambling in recent days trying to resurrect his reputation, not that he ever had a good one.

Painfully aware, apparently belatedly aware, that his latest financial fiasco had once again alienated Marlins fans, Loria last week staged a public relations blitz. He began it with a full-page advertisement in South Florida newspapers and ended it by prematurely disappearing from a news conference, his first session with reporters since the end of last season.

This was how the Associated Press reported the end to Loria’s so-called news conference:

“As he stepped away from the TV cameras after 15 minutes, a PR aide said the owner would take more questions. Instead, Loria disappeared through a clubhouse door and didn’t return.”

That is the Jeffrey Loria I have come to know. This is also the Jeffrey Loria I have come to know.

During the news conference, when he was still present and answering questions, Loria was asked about trying to change the impression that his new ball park, which was built with mostly government money, was “a con job,” he replied, “A con job? I’m not even going to answer that.”

Loria might not have appreciated the question or the characterization, but in his 11 years as the team’s owner, he has at least done a good job of impersonating a con man.

The Marlins had always been one of the lowest-paying teams in the majors until they opened their new park last season. Then with a new park, a new name, new uniforms and new expensive players, they opened with a club-record $118 million payroll. By the end of their 93-loss, last-place season, though, the payroll had been slashed by nearly a quarter, to $90 million.

The payroll dived even deeper after the season when the Marlins traded Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Josh Johnson and has been estimated at less than $45 million for the start of the coming season.

Loria has vehemently denied that he had engaged in another salary dump, saying last winter’s high-priced acquisitions didn’t work and the team had to start over with young (cheap) talent.

But if the Marlins made bad moves by signing Reyes, Buehrle and Heath Bell, why didn’t Loria get rid of the people who opted to make the moves instead of the players? Oh, that’s right. Loria himself was behind the moves. Nothing the Marlins do happens without the input and decision-making of Loria, a modern-day George Steinbrenner but even more hands on.

Loria can’t very well fire himself, though Marlins fans would heartily welcome the move and maybe even return to the ball park.