Baseball players with local ties named in Mitchell report

A Garden Grove man who used to coach Huntington Beach High School baseball can’t believe allegations his former player Howie Clark used performance-enhancing drugs.

“I’m absolutely, totally surprised,” said former Huntington Beach High School coach Mike Dodd, who has kept in touch with Clark. “He’s as strait-laced as they come, a nonsmoker and a nondrinker.”

Former Sen. George Mitchell’s 409-page report on drugs in baseball released Wednesday accuses Clark, a former Oiler who has played in the major and minor leagues for the Baltimore Orioles and the Toronto Blue Jays, of using human growth hormone.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig hired Mitchell to look into steroid use in baseball. Much of the report is based on testimony by former New York Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski, who cooperated with the investigation as part of his plea agreement in April to federal charges of money laundering and distributing steroids.

The report reproduces two money orders from Clark to Radomski, and states “Radomski said that he had made four or five sales of human grown hormone to Clark and that Clark paid him by money order or check.”

Efforts to reach Clark were unsuccessful, and he did not speak to Mitchell.

More than anything, Dodd says he’s worried about Clark, 32, whom he called “a wonderful, wonderful kid and one of the best baseball players I ever coached.

“I’m concerned about him as a human being,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a blackball type of thing for some guy like Howie making minimum in the big leagues.”

Former Minnesota Twin and New York Yankee Dan Naulty was also named in the report. He played in the major leagues from 1996 to 1999. Naulty played for Ocean View High School in the late 1980s.

Naulty admitted using steroids in the minor leagues and with the Twins, according to the Mitchell report. The document says that he started in 1993 to put on weight for spring training, but ultimately regretted doing so and blamed them for a string of injuries.

“He told us that, ‘If I could give back a little bit of something good then I would like to,’” according to the report.