When I told Bob DuPuy five weeks ago that I had heard he was leaving Major League Baseball and asked him why, he said, “I’ve made no decision about leaving.” On Tuesday DuPuy announced that he was leaving.

The same day Gene Orza announced his retirement from his 26-year tenure with the Major League Baseball Players Association. Orza was the union’s first chief operating officer; DuPuy was Major League Baseball’s second c.o.o. He was also the president.

Though the announcements of their departure were coincidental, the circumstances of their departure are not similar. DuPuy, according to more than one person in baseball, is resigning because Commissioner Bud Selig has declined to endorse him as his successor when his contract is up after the 2012 season.

DuPuy, 62 years old, has not acknowledged that as the reason, but that’s the word that prevails throughout baseball.

Skeptics may think that Orza is leaving the union because he was not chosen to succeed Donald Fehr as executive director, but he made clear in an interview and an e-mail message to union officials and staff that is not the reason.

“I have never wanted to be executive director of the union,” the 64-year-old Orza said on the telephone Wednesday. “If they had offered the job to me I would not have taken it. I would have said give it to Michael. He’s better for the job.”

Michael Weiner succeeded Fehr last December and has long been highly regarded within the union and by people in the commissioner’s office.

“Michael is better at this. He thinks I’m a pretty smart guy, but Michael is smarter than I am. I knew Michael was the guy 10 years ago.”

Orza didn’t say it, but Weiner also has a more congenial way of dealing with the players than he does. Over his 26 years with the union, Orza has ruffled some players with his comments or the way he has talked to them.

Orza has also been a target of the news media. Reporters have been quick to single him out for criticism when they have been the ones deserving of criticism for not knowing what they were writing about, or if they did know, deliberately ignoring the facts.

If this sound like I am an apologist for Orza, I am not. He doesn’t need an apologist. Let me cite some examples of misguided reports questioning Orza’s behavior.

Selena Roberts of Sports Illustrated reported that Orza told Alex Rodriguez and another player when they would be tested for steroids. Impossible, Orza said, because he never knew when players would be tested. No one did.

He said it was possible that if a player who hadn’t been tested asked him when he might be and only a couple of weeks remained in the season, Orza would explain that the program mandated that each player be tested during the season. The player would then understand that he would be tested in the next couple of weeks.

Orza, however, has been even more severely criticized for not having destroyed the results from the 2003 survey drug tests, which the union had the right to do.

After federal authorities illegally seized the results, the identities of several players on the list of positive tests were leaked to reporters, particularly Michael Schmidt of The New York Times, who acknowledged that he sought names from any source (lawyer) he could find even though the list was under court seal.

It seems that every time Schmidt mentioned Orza’s name in an article he also mentioned his failure to destroy the results.

“Schmidt knows why we didn’t destroy the tests,” Orza said, “but he keeps writing that we didn’t destroy the tests when we could have.”

Schmidt wrote it most recently this week in an article about Orza’s retirement.

“We got wind that the government was interested in what existed so we didn’t destroy anything,” Orza said. “The government mistakenly subpoenaed us, thinking we had the results. We didn’t want to be accused of obstruction of justice. Knowing the government was looking for the stuff, what should we do?”

Schmidt and the Times have never published this explanation. They prefer to maintain the mystery. Schmidt, Orza said, prefers to enhance the celebrity he has attained from being the main steroids man.

Orza plans to leave his post at the end of spring training next year. According to baseball’s news release, DuPuy “has resigned,” meaning he is no longer president and chief operating officer.

When I spoke with him five weeks ago, DuPuy said of his possible departure, “I have a contract and I plan to honor that contract.”

He wouldn’t say when the contract expired — “That’s between me and the commissioner and the executive council,” he said – but it’s unlikely the contract expired Sept. 28, the day his resignation was announced.

DuPuy came into baseball through his association with Selig, first as the Milwaukee Brewers’ lawyer, then as a lawyer for baseball, in which capacity he negotiated the clubs’ $280 million settlement with the union of the collusion cases of the mid-1980s. He became president and c.o.o. in 2002.

It might have been natural for someone in his position to want and expect to rise to the next level, especially when the person who holds that job has said he will retire after the 2012 season. But though he should have known better DuPuy isn’t the first baseball executive to make the mistake of saying he was interested in the boss’s job.

When Len Coleman was the National League president in the 1990s and Selig was the acting commissioner and said he didn’t want to be commissioner, Coleman believed him and said he was interested in the job. That was the end of Coleman in baseball.

It would probably be wise for any future prospective commissioner to refrain from expressing his interest in the position until the incumbent is no longer with us.