This Cagey Veteran Has a Swinging Time Playing Ball at Home

Brian Downing digs into the batter’s box and calls his shot, as if he were Babe Ruth or Willie Mosconi.

“Plum tree,” Downing says, confidently.

Here’s the pitch, a hard slider, low and away. Downing lashes out with that non-patented, non-textbook flail of a swing and lines the ball deep to left field, deep, deep . . .

The ball actually travels only 20 feet before careening off the side of Downing’s back yard batting cage, shaking loose a plum from a dwarf tree growing against the chain-link. The plum tree is Downing’s target for drives to left field. When he’s trying to advance a runner, hit to the opposite field, he aims for the little peach tree down the right-field line.

The Angels have a game tonight, but the team’s designated hitter has already spent three hours in his weight room and will spend at least an hour in his batting cage.

It is a daily routine that would sap most players. What is does for Downing, 37, is send him off to the ballpark with a head of steam. He needs to come to work agitated, aggressive, angry. He cannot hit with that detached precision of Rod Carew. Downing approaches baseball with the mind-set of a hockey goon or a defensive tackle, or a man trying to outswim a shark.

By major league standards, Downing has marginal talent, at best. Yet he has carved out a successful 15-year career. Hundreds of Orange County men who once went to school with Brian surely ask themselves, “How did Brian Downing get to the big leagues?”

I’m sitting outside Brian Downing’s batting cage, looking at the answer to that question.

Downing lives in a very nice house in Yorba Linda, with a very nice back yard--a pretty swimming pool and fish pond, lots of lush shrubs and grass and palm trees. Those are mostly for Cheryl and the three boys, although Brian does all the yard and pool maintenance.

Beside the house, in an area most folks would use for firewood or a doggie run, Brian built a batting cage. He had it dug about two feet into the ground, partly for privacy, partly for acoustics. He remembered the visitors’ bullpen at Kansas City, surrounded by walls that amplify sounds. Fastballs pop the bullpen catcher’s mitt like cannon shots. Every pitcher strides out of that pen feeling like Nolan Ryan.

Same idea here, the cage dug down, in an enclosed area.

“You get a real authoritative crack,” Downing explains. “It just gives you a feeling, gets you pumped. It’s mental preparation.”

He dumps a load of baseballs into the hopper of the pitching machine, walks back to home plate, hits a switch and the beast whirs to life. Two tires spinning together spit out fastballs, curves, sliders, scroogies, changeups . . .

Downing sets the machine to pitch what he is likely to see tonight. Or sometimes he sets it to pitch to his current weakness.

Or if he’s really down, feeling particularly glum about his stroke, he’ll order the machine to serve up big, fat fastballs, out over the plate, chest high.

Each swing has a purpose; each cut is a real at-bat. No mindless hacking here.

“Oh-and-two count, second baseman playing back, runner on third, one out . . . Peach tree.”

Brian will hit to that situation 25 times, then think up a new one.

Every five seconds, a ball drops down the chute, squeezes between the spinning tires and hisses toward the plate. Every day Downing takes maybe 500 cuts, although he doesn’t count them.

It’s not precise mechanics he’s after, it’s a feeling. He sorts through dozens of stances each day, tries out different swings. He’s like a student, forever learning to play piano by ear.

“I don’t analyze,” he says, “I just get up there and react.”

This year he has been hitting off-key. Fighting a shoulder injury, Downing was batting .250 and leading the team in homers with 9 through Tuesday. But he has been inconsistent, has left too many men on base. He has been struggling. Even when he hit a game-winning home run in Yankee Stadium, he was angry at himself, embarrassed that the homer was not Ruthian.

When he is presented a trophy ball, such as the one he knocked for his 1,000th big-league hit, he throws it into his pitching-machine hopper.

He describes his hitting style: “I’ve never had good mechanics. I’ve always hit from that ugly stance. I’m an extreme lunger at the plate, I’ve never been able to stay behind the pitch, I move way too much . . . “

Maybe if he’d practiced.

If the Angels ever erected a statue of a ballplayer at Anaheim Stadium, the player would be Downing. Yet he treats himself as a fringe player, hanging on, surviving.

If Downing ever wrote a book, it would be titled “The Power of Positive Pessimism.”

Oh, there is a reason for the fruit trees around the batting cage.

Downing likes them. They remind him of his happy boyhood, when this obsession with the game of baseball took root in his heart.

The back yard of his family’s home in Orange County was filled with fruit trees. Summer days and weekends, sunup to sunset, Brian was in that back yard, playing by himself. He would toss a bottle cap into the air and hit it, fungo-style. Hour after hour. He never got tired, never grew bored.

“I had regular games, I had leagues, I kept records and complete stats,” he says. “The Dodgers always won. I was the hitters, pitchers, defensive players, Vin Scully, the crowd. It was my life’s passion.

“I was still doing it, every day, until I signed my first contract when I was 20-something. I was 20-years old, dreaming like a 12-year-old kid. I just never wanted to wake up to reality.”

If he did leave the back yard, it was to hit off the pitching machines at Home Run Park on Beach Boulevard in Anaheim, or to scrounge the streets and search through the trash bins at the 7-Eleven, replenishing his supply of bottle caps.

To this day, Downing will spot a bottle cap on the ground and mentally inspect it for fungo suitability. Is it bent at the proper angle for tossing up a good curve ball?

And the trees.

“They were the fans,” Downing says. “A tree full of apricots, they were the little heads of the fans, sitting out there in the bleachers, cheering.”

He comes home at night after ballgames, still keyed up. Sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning, Downing will think up a new stance or reflect on a bad swing. He will feel the urge to hit some balls in the cage.

Instead, he retreats to his weight room, plays an Albert Collins blues tape and practices his swing in the mirror.

Why not go out and hit in the cage?

Brian doesn’t want to disturb the neighbors or wake the kids. At night, the CRRRAAACK of the bat would echo for blocks. And how would he keep the peaches and plums from cheering?