THE COMEBACK OF STEVE ROGERS : It’s 3 Starts Down and 2 to Go on Edmonton-to-Anaheim Trail

The Ice Man cometh out of the Edmonton Trappers’ training room and sitteth down in the middle of the clubhouse.

A huge bag of ice is strapped to his right shoulder, another is wrapped around his right elbow. A third is attached to his left hip.

“And,” says Steve Rogers as he props his left leg on a chair, “I’ll be getting another for this knee in a few minutes.”

Someone offers Rogers a beer, something to quench the thirst worked up in nine innings on the pitcher’s mound. Rogers waves him off, although he certainly could keep it cold for someone.

So, there rests Steve Rogers, packed in ice, the newest property of the California Angels.

This scene would appear to be enough to cause some fidgeting in the Angel front office. The team has been this way before.

By now, it’s an old story:

The Angel pitching staff suffers its annual breakdown. The team looks outside for help. The general manager comes up with a former All-Star, now in his mid-30s, his best days only memories. Arm problems have cropped up in recent years, and his former employers say he has lost his stuff for good. But the Angels are desperate and decide to take a chance.

Any number of names can be written into this never-ending plot--Craig Swan, John Curtis, Luis Tiant, Dave Goltz, Doug Rau. The Angels have tried them all.

Is Rogers simply the 1985 version, just another spin of this team’s broken record with broken-down pitchers?

Well, maybe.

Rogers would certainly seem to fit the bill. He’s 35. He led the National League with a 2.40 earned-run average three years ago and was an All-Star as recently as 1983, but had rotator-cuff problems in 1984.

He wound up the season with a 6-15 record and a 4.31 ERA. The six victories were the fewest of his major league career, and the ERA was his highest in a decade. Shuttled between the starting rotation and the bullpen during the first two months of 1985, Rogers went 2-4 with a 5.68 ERA. On May 20, the Montreal Expos handed him his release.

“He made five starts and four weren’t good,” Manager Buck Rodgers of the Expos said. “We put him in the bullpen for 10 days, then let him make two more starts. They weren’t good, either.

“His velocity was reduced, his delivery was erratic, he wasn’t throwing strikes. It would have required some major adjustments that he may have been able to make, but . . . we didn’t feel we could give him the time necessary to make those adjustments, and we had people capable of replacing him.”

Enter the Angels. Frustrated in their attempts to trade for a pitcher like Bert Blyleven or John Candelaria, the Angels had to settle for giving Rogers a tryout with their Triple-A affiliate in Edmonton.

Rogers is being given a test run of five starts. The intention is for him to pitch well enough in those five starts to earn a spot on the Angels’ starting staff.

Heard enough? Not in the mood for this sort of summer re-run?

Well, the Angels are hoping, with admittedly cautious optimism, that Rogers can pencil a few surprises into the time-worn script. And there are some differences this time around.

First, the Angels are not living and dying with every sinker Rogers throws in the Pacific Coast League. The team’s current rotation, including new names such as Kirk McCaskill and Urbano Lugo, is holding its own in the American League at the moment.

Second, the Angels’ financial risk is minimal. Rogers’ contract calls for an annual $900,000, but the Angels are responsible for only $30,000 of it.

As Bill Bavasi, the Angels’ director of minor league operations, said: “What have we got to lose? If he pitches well, that’s just one more prospect we have. I couldn’t care less if he’s 50 years old--a prospect is a prospect. He could wind up helping us win a pennant.”

Then, too, this is Steve Rogers we’re talking about, not Steve Blateric. This is a man with 158 victories in 12 major league seasons, who won 15 or more games five times since 1974, who pitched four one-hitters, who was chosen to five National League All-Star teams.

Here in Alberta, as in the rest of Canada, Rogers is regarded with the same reverence Angelenos hold for Sandy Koufax and Fernando Valenzuela.

“Steve Rogers is Mr. Baseball in Canada,” said Mel Kowalchuk, president of the Trappers. “I suppose only Ferguson Jenkins has been so well-known throughout all of Canada.”

Kowalchuk is not overstating the case. The Edmonton newspapers went overboard in their advance treatment of Rogers’ first appearance at John Ducey Park Thursday night. The Sun ran a question-and-answer interview with the returning hero under the headline, “A Man Called Cy.” The banner atop the Journal’s sports section read: “Rogers a hot ticket for his Ducey debut.”

Indeed, Rogers was a hot ticket. His first start in Edmonton was a sellout in advance, with early-afternoon showers keeping the total just under the stadium’s 5,000-fan capacity.

“Steve has done the job for us without throwing a pitch, just in terms of publicity and fan interest,” Kowalchuk said. “We’ve had Gary Pettis here; we had Ron Kittle hit 50 home runs here, but no one’s had anywhere near the impact of Steve Rogers.”

Back when the Toronto Blue Jays were nothing but fodder for the contenders in the American League East, the Expos were Team Canada, and Rogers was Pitcher Canada. The team’s games were televised nationally, and an entire nation thrilled as Rogers pitched the Expos to the brink of the World Series in 1981.

That’s why people living in Edmonton, a city about 2,500 miles from Montreal, still consider this to be Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.

“We’ve had calls from people wanting to know how to get to the ballpark--people who have lived here all their lives but have never seen one of our games,” Kowalchuk said. “This is a hockey town, but Rogers has awakened a lot of people here to baseball.”

The bigger task at hand for Rogers, of course, is awakening a career the Expos had considered dead on its feet a month ago.

So how goes the comeback?

Winston Llenas, Edmonton’s manager, pressed his finger against a locker room blackboard and drew what resembled an italicized N in the chalk dust.

“Three starts,” Llenas said as he pointed. “Up, then down, then way up.”

Start No. 1, June 9, at Vancouver: Making his first minor league appearance since 1973, Rogers throws 5 shutout innings and earns credit for the Trappers’ 7-2 victory. Edmonton catcher Bobby Ramos, who used to back up Gary Carter at Montreal, says Rogers’ outing brought back memories of better days.

“That was as good as he used to throw with the Expos,” Ramos says. “He had the good, hard sinkerball. He was moving his pitches in and out, setting the hitters up. You had to wonder, ‘What’s he doing here?’ ”

Rogers calls it an encouraging first step. “I threw consistently and with good overall velocity,” he says. “It was something to build on.”

Start No. 2, June 15, at Portland: Here is where it seems to fall apart. Rogers yields 12 hits and 6 earned runs in 6 innings of a 7-4 loss.

Rogers describes it as “a necessary step, the dead-arm phase, something I had to throw through.”

Preston Gomez, Angel special assignment scout, can’t find anything positive about it, though.

“I’d have to say it was not good, at all,” Gomez says. “He was all over the place. Had no velocity. Had poor command of his pitches. He had problems with his mechanics.

“That was not the Steve Rogers I used to know when I managed the Cubs and the Astros. It’s impossible to expect him to pitch that way again. But if that day (in Portland) was any indication, he cannot help anybody.”

Start No. 3, June 20, Las Vegas: This time, Rogers gives Gomez something to write home about. He retires the first 12 batters he faces, pitches all 9 innings, gives up 2 runs on 6 singles, and strikes out 5.

But because the slumping Trappers can produce just one run, Rogers comes away a 2-1 loser.

“That takes the luster off it, but I’m analyzing my own performance,” Rogers says. “That’s the focus of my being here, the individual progress.

“I feel good with the three-game process. That was the best velocity I’ve had, the best extension I’ve had on my fastball and slider. I would feel good carrying that stuff into a major league game. I feel that stuff would put me right there against anybody.”

Rogers has a pet phrase-- a winning-type game. In 1982, for instance, Rogers won 19 games but said he turned in 33 winning-type games in 35 starts.

This one, too, could be considered a winning-type game, he said. Llenas agreed.

“Oh, yeah,” Llenas said. “The way he pitched tonight, he could win in the major leagues. For one thing, he’s gonna get better support than he did tonight.”

Gomez, in the stands to chart every pitch, summed up Rogers’ effort against Las Vegas as first-rate.

“The difference between this start and his last one was (like) night and day,” he said. “This is the way he has to pitch. He had 13 ground balls and 6 fly balls. The hits he gave up were ground balls and most were not hit hard at all.

“I want to see more.”

Of course, the Las Vegas Stars, the cellar team in the PCL’s South Division, aren’t exactly the Detroit Tigers or the Boston Red Sox. But the way Rogers sees it, he is more than halfway through his five-game trial, and his performances so far have him in the black.

“I’m happy with the progression,” he said. “What I’d like to do next is refine what I’ve got, to be a little more consistent with location. That’s the natural next step.

“But it feels good to have some zip on the ball. You don’t have to throw the ball in a tea cup if you can throw it with some pop.”

The Expos said they didn’t see much of a pop this season from Rogers, only a fizz. Team scouts had clocked his fastest deliveries consistently in the 87-m.p.h. range in September 1983. That mark had dropped off to 81-82 m.p.h. by spring.

Much of that, Rogers said, had to do with his shoulder ailment of 1984, a small tear in the group of muscles commonly known as the rotator cuff. That injury was originally misdiagnosed as injured cartilage. Unaware of the tear, Rogers kept on pitching and kept on losing. His stock with the Expos kept on plummeting.

Montreal tried to trade him. In fact, a deal with Houston was arranged, until Rogers demanded a no-trade contract from the Astros. The Astros balked, and Rogers, as a major league veteran of 10 seasons and five with the same team, exercised his veto power.

Later, the Expos cut Canada’s Mr. Baseball.

“When a team releases you, it says, in essence, that your market value is zero,” Rogers said. “I never believed it. One month, you’re worth a young pitcher’s contract, and the next, you’re nothing? Uh-uh.”

Rogers bites off all conversation about his feeling toward the Expos these days. “My feelings are irrelevant,” he said. “That’s past history and negative. Certainly, the love affair with the organization is over, but that’s a part of business.”

Ramos, who observed some of Rogers’ final days in Montreal in 1984, said he saw the split coming.

“Last year, when he had the arm problems, seemed to carry over to this year,” he said. “Sometimes, an organization can turn negative on you. Sometimes, they can cut you short.

“I think he can still help somebody in the big leagues. Hopefully, he’ll get back to the big leagues and show the people in Montreal that what they did was very wrong.”

The Angels are hoping that the odds will finally break their way. Dip into the retread pool often enough and something is bound to happen, right?

Well, the Angels figure they have this much going: Gene Mauch was Rogers’ first manager in Montreal, and Marcel Lachemann was his Triple-A pitching coach. Maybe the combination can work again.

That notion, Rogers admitted, entered into his thinking when he was considering free-agent offers after he was released.

“California took a very personal interest in me,” Rogers said. “Gene was my first manager, Marcel was my first pitching coach. They showed a genuine interest in me.

“And I like the team. It’s a very good blend of young and old talent.”

Rogers thought about what he had just said. “Don’t write that,” he said, adding with a smile: “Say seasoned players. I can be considered an old talent.”

So, for Rogers, it’s three starts down, two to go before decision time. Kowalchuk has the ideal scenario planned: “The best thing that could happen is for him to pitch very well his last two games at home, go to the Angels and win the World Series with them,” Kowalchuk said.

On a less wishful note, Rogers is simply planning to pitch again in the major leagues in 1985. And what if the Angels, after Rogers’ five-start trial, say they’re not interested?

“There are a couple of other teams,” Rogers said. “But I’m looking at the positive. At this point in time, I’ve never not believed that I should be pitching in the major leagues.”