Downing Has Something to Talk About

Early in July, Angel Manager Gene Mauch was sitting in the dugout, trying to explain a clubhouse tirade by Brian Downing to a group of writers. The day before, the Angel left fielder had screamed and waved a bat in the face of a reporter who had written that he was no longer speaking to the media.

“He’s a little uptight these days,” Mauch said. “The guy’s hitting .225. You guys hit .225 and nobody notices, but they flash his average on the board every time he steps up.”

If that was the problem, Downing should have been downright cheery then. After all, three weeks earlier he was hitting .191.

Downing probably will never be nominated for Mr. Congeniality by the local chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America, but that is of little concern to Mauch. In 1982, Downing went up to the press box to confront a writer and threw a beer against the wall to emphasize his disgust.

He also hit 28 home runs and drove in 84 runs that year for Mauch and the Angel manager hasn’t forgotten. He played Downing on an almost-regular basis all along, suffered through his offensive struggles with him and waited.

“Brian Downing is too good a hitter to hit .225,” Mauch said that afternoon in July. “He’ll turn it around.”

There were times, certainly, when Downing himself must have wondered when, though.

“The first six weeks of the season, I was hitting around .300,” Downing said Sunday after the Angels’ 4-3 loss to Oakland at Anaheim Stadium. “Then, I went six weeks when I got about six hits. The only thing that made it palatable was that we had around a five-game lead the whole time, and I managed to contribute a couple quality hits.”

Then, as quickly as he lost it, Downing’s stroke returned and he started shooting line drives all over the place.

He’s hitting .446 in his last 19 games with 6 homers and 21 RBIs. He’s had four three-RBI performances during that stretch and drove in two more Sunday with a double to the wall in right-center. He added a single Sunday, giving him 13 multiple-hit games in 19 outings.

“It was just a matter of getting comfortable,” Moose Stubing, Angels hitting instructor, said. “All hitters go through it. He’d completely lost it for a while and then all of sudden he fell back in the groove.”

Downing is also back in the leadoff spot, the position in the order he held in ’82 under Mauch. He’s been used as the leadoff hitter 16 times this season and is hitting .381 with 10 runs scored, five homers and 19 RBIs--statistics that are even more impressive considering he did not have a hit in his first 15 at-bats in the No. 1 spot.

“Hitting in the leadoff spot hasn’t had anything to do with it,” Downing said. “Except that when things are going well, you want to be up there as often as possible. And the seven, eight and nine guys have been getting on a lot, giving me a lot of RBI opportunities.”

Downing has increased his RBI total to 63, a more-than-respectable output for a guy that went 4 for 61 at one stretch this summer. He picked up his 11th game-winning RBI Saturday night, equaling his career high last year.

Downing has rebounded quickly, but Mauch’s patience during Downings’ slumps was deeply rooted in historical precedence. You don’t have to look too far back in the Angel annals to see that Downing’s hitting has tailed off during the mid-season.

“It’s been my M.O. for about four years now,” he admitted glumly.

There’s a striking similarity to last year. On July 22, 1984, he was hitting .219. Forty-nine games later, he was up to .276. On June 21 of this season, Downing had a .191 average. Fifty-two games later, its .273.

Downing doesn’t have any simple answers for his mid-summer slumbers. He says he was trying to manufacture hits during the slump, trying to move the ball around the field and aim it toward the holes. But he doesn’t know why.

He only knows that now he’s back doing what he does best: “Swing hard and let them go where they want.”

Before the season began, Downing told his wife, Cheryl, that he wouldn’t care if he hit .225 as long as the Angels won the World Series. For a long time, it was looking like at least half of his wish would come true.

Mauch, however, wasn’t concerned.

“The man can hit,” he said Sunday. “A guy like that doesn’t lose it overnight.”

Maybe not. But for Brian Downing, “it” seems frustratingly prone toward extended summer vacations.