Something Dreadful Bugging Downing

With age theoretically comes wisdom, but only the wisest of wise guys would spend a day in the park with the California Angels and come away thinking of them as the Wheeze Kids.

Just because 16 of their players, including the disabled but hardly feeble Terry Forster, are 30 years old or older, and just because some of them can actually remember when baseball mitts were brown, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Angels ought to make a straight two-for-two swap, Gatorade and Copenhagen for Geritol and Polident.

They have a very fine record, after all, and probably will take the American League West, provided the Texas Rangers soon start playing like the Texas Rangers we have come to know and love.

Nevertheless, if Brian Downing is going to continue wheezing and coughing at home plate, the Angels are going to convince people that they are as old as they look. Catchers are going to tell pitchers to take it easy on these poor old souls. Toss underhand or something.

Just before he doubled home a couple of runs Sunday in a 4-0 win over the Seattle Mariners, Downing went off on another coughing jag, just as he has for much of the last month as a victim of viral bronchitis.

“The worst part is that my eyes start to water,” he said later. Yet, after standing at the batter’s box crooping like a chain-smoker at a brush fire, Downing took the next pitch down the right-field line.

We have heard of batters hacking away at a fastball, but this is ridiculous.

As a rule, Downing is one of the most healthy human specimens ever to hide his muscles in a baggy baseball shirt. He is a fitness buff whose home has more equipment than a gym. Some houses are Tudor or Colonial. The Downings’ is early Nautilus.

On the road, the Angel left fielder heads straight for local body-building joints. “Some people call them ‘musclehead’ clubs,” he said. “They’re places where people take their work seriously, where everybody in the room is massive.” In other words, not some health spa where a guy would go to take saunas and meet girls.

In towns where no such club is convenient, Downing unfolds the portable Ultra-Shaper that he lugs with him wherever he goes. It is a flexible piece of equipment, 7 feet long and 4 inches wide, with pulleys, and Downing just hooks it to his hotel door.

Good health is such a big thing to Brian Downing that it is doubly exasperating for him to be felled by something so common as a cough. He is not even truly ill anymore. “Everybody in here thinks I’m sick. Everybody thinks I’ve got the flu,” Downing said in the Angel clubhouse. “I don’t. I’ve just got the cough that won’t quit.”

It first started annoying him during a road swing that began in Toronto on the Fourth of July. What caused it, he couldn’t figure. Manager Gene Mauch said: “He was told that usually a cough like that comes from a blow on your chest. And he immediately associated that with the collision that he had with (center fielder) Gary Pettis. But that collision was way back in May.”

It had to be something else. Downing, literally sick and tired of it, finally went to a Santa Ana pulmonary clinic. “What they primarily said was, there’s basically three airways to the lungs, and one of them is spasming,” Downing said. “It’s closing off the air from getting in.” He was given a throat spray and essentially was told that the cough would have to run its course.

Sitting in front of his locker after a game last Friday night, five weeks after the coughing first began, Downing simply could not stop. Mauch could hear it all the way from his office.

“He was just sitting there and had no control over it,” Mauch said. “It was convulsive. Terrible. And those things have a debilitating effect of their own. The coughs themselves just wear you out. That’s why I didn’t play him the next day.”

It gave the manager himself pause Sunday as he reached, reflexively, to his desk for a cigarette.

“I cough for a different reason,” he said, holding up the pack.

Downing appreciated the day off. He needed the rest. During the period of his illness, his batting average tumbled from .292 to .269. He has lost weight, has lost strength, and in stress situations, like hitting with men on base, he acknowledges that the coughing seems to get worse.

Mariner catcher Scott Bradley must have thought Downing was dying when the whooping started Sunday in the seventh inning, when the Angels had runners on second and third.

“I imagine so,” Downing said. “It’s a deep-seated cough, and it’s not a pretty sound. It sounds like I’m getting ready to check out.”

But Downing delivered the two-run double, and the Wheeze Kids had done it again. These are hardly teen Angels we are talking about here. Downing is 35, but an amazing eight teammates are as old or older. Sunday’s starting lineup had only three men under 35.

Such facts bore Downing. Forget the age and consider the quality, he says. And besides, this is the era of the well-conditioned athlete. “Look around the room,” Downing said. “Most of them are guys of, well, advanced age, but they are hardly average guys. Most of their training regimens would kill some younger men.”

The Wheeze Kids ought to be able to hang on to finish the season, at least. Pitchers Donnie Moore and John Candelaria, both 32, are over their injuries, and Forster, 34, is almost over his. Rick Burleson, 35, has made his comeback. Doug DeCinces, 36, and Bobby Grich, 37, are doing fine, and Bob Boone, 38, catches on. Reggie Jackson, 40, and Don Sutton, 41, have portraits in their attics that are aging in their place.

“It’s important now that they’re all strong and feel good, so we can keep all of this going. I feel like we can and I feel like we will,” Mauch said after Sunday’s win.

Darned if he didn’t cough just as he said it.

“Ooh,” Mauch said, tapping his chest. “Brian Downing lives.”