Angels’ steroid link was Riggs

Sixteen former Angels and Gary Matthews Jr. were connected to performance-enhancing drugs in baseball when the Mitchell Report was released Thursday. One of them, Adam Riggs, was responsible for introducing a steroid connection to Angels teammates, according to the report.

Riggs, an infielder in the Dodgers organization from 1994 to 2000, joined the Angels in 2003. With the Dodgers, he was a minor league teammate of catcher Paul Lo Duca, who introduced Riggs to Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets clubhouse attendant who pleaded guilty to steroid distribution. Radomski met with former Sen. George Mitchell this year as part of a plea bargain and was a major source for the report.

Radomski said he “engaged in six to 10 transactions with Riggs from 2003 to 2005,” selling him steroids and human growth hormone.

The report included copies of five checks and money orders from Riggs to Radomski.

Radomski said Riggs later referred Angels pitchers Brendan Donnelly and Bart Miadich to him. Radomski said he sold Deca-Durabolin, a steroid, to Donnelly in 2004 for $250 to $300.

The report said that when the Boston Red Sox were considering trading for Donnelly in 2006, Zack Scott of the Red Sox baseball operations staff wrote of Donnelly in an e-mail to team vice president Ben Charington: “He was a juice guy but his velocity hasn’t changed a lot over the years. . . . If he was a juice guy, he could be a breakdown candidate.”

The Red Sox traded for Donnelly last December. He was 2-1 with a 3.05 earned-run average before suffering an elbow injury in June, and had reconstruction surgery on his right elbow in August.

Only hours before the Mitchell Report came out Thursday, the Red Sox announced they would not offer Donnelly a contract for 2008. A team spokesman said there was no connection between the move and the report.

“The club had no idea about names prior to release of this report,” Red Sox spokesman John Blake told the Associated Press. “We didn’t get anything until Mitchell released it at 2 o’clock. So there’s no way that anybody had any inkling that Donnelly would be mentioned in that report.”

Donnelly did not respond to phone messages left for him by The Times.

Miadich, who pitched briefly for the Angels in 2001 and 2003, bought steroids from Radomski from 2002 to 2005, according to Radomski.

Others who played for the Angels and were named in the report were Paul Byrd, Jason Christiansen, Troy Glaus, Jason Grimsley, Jose Guillen, Glenallen Hill, Wally Joyner, Kent Mercker, Scott Schoeneweis, Derrick Turnbow, Ismael Valdez, Mo Vaughn and Randy Velarde.

Commissioner Bud Selig recently suspended Guillen for 15 days, based on information from a New York investigation linking him to the use of performance-enhancing substances at a time those substances were banned under baseball rules and under penalties in place at the time.

Selig spared Matthews, Glaus and Schoeneweis because of “insufficient evidence” linking those players to the use of specific substances during a time they were banned.

The Angels’ only comment on the Mitchell report was a statement that said the team was “in full agreement with the recommendations from Sen. Mitchell as listed in the report, and the Angels will continue to support Commissioner Selig in his ongoing efforts to eliminate performance-enhancing drugs from baseball.

“There is no place in the game for such substances, and we have and will continue to do what we can to eliminate them.”

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alex.kimball@latimes.com