THE MANAGERS : TRACING RADER : His Troubles With Texas Rangers Now Behind Him, New Angel Manager Is Looking Ahead to Better Times

It is an odd coupling, Doug Rader and the Angels, but, then, opposites have attracted before. If you squint a little, this match made in Mike Port’s office begins to make sense, if only for the purpose of mutual rehabilitation.

Personality is the common thread here. Rader, the ribald Red Rooster, the Texas terror, the frothy flake of Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four,” has come to Mesa to channel his. The Angels, languid losers of their last 12 games, have come to find one.

Consider it the grand experiment of the Arizona desert: The team without character gets a character.

Where the experiment goes from here is anyone’s guess, but the track record suggests turbulence ahead. In 1983, Rader took over a Texas Ranger team that changed managers as often as calendars, finished 29 games back the previous season and was cursed by a lack of pitching.

Sound familiar? In 1989, the Angels find themselves in the same boat, only hoping not to be dashed against the same rocks.

For a half-season, Rader prodded, harangued and raised the Rangers’ level of play to inexplicable heights. At the 1983 All-Star break, Texas was 10 games above .500, leading the American League West by two games.

Then, the irresistible force was introduced to the wall. From that All-Star break on through Rader’s firing in May of 1985, the Rangers went 111-166, a winning percentage of .401. Texas dropped back to 22 games off the pace in 1983, finished last in 1984 and was 9-23 in 1985 at the time of Rader’s dismissal.

Losing baseball games is one thing. How Rader went about it was another. In Texas, where tales admittedly grow tall, Rader’s tenure as manager is remembered about as fondly as the Marquis de Sade’s.

Rader, it is said, tormented a pitching staff, calling future All-Star reliever Tom Henke “gutless” and embarrassing future 20-game winner Dave Stewart with a verbal dressing-down on the mound. Rader, it is said, alienated the core of Texas veterans--Buddy Bell, Larry Parrish, Billy Sample--by publicly questioning their desire and prompted the controversial trade of Gold Glove catcher Jim Sundberg by publicly questioning his manhood.

As the team broke down around him, Rader feuded with fans, with management, with reporters. The quirky impulsiveness that made Rader, the player, a sportswriter’s delight--how can you not love a guy who once implored Little Leaguers to eat baseball cards because “they have lots of information on them”?--gave way to erratic bursts of temper that made Rader the scourge of the note-pad set. One writer who covered Rader during those days says he would’ve preferred covering Genghis Khan.

Even Rader himself wonders about the figure he cut as the ogre of Arlington. The four years that have since passed, Rader says, has given him the chance to do some thinking, or, rather, rethinking.

“You get to stand back, away from it, for a little while and you look at it,” Rader said. “You get introspective. If you don’t, you’re crazy.”

And, in Rader’s case, you get confessional. An interview with Rader about the Texas experience today takes on the tone of an hour-long mea culpa .

“The thing about it is, I don’t have a bitter bone in my body toward any of these guys,” Rader said of the old Rangers. “And that’s probably the hardest thing for me to ever deal with--that these people were treated along these ways.

“Guys like Tom Henke and Buddy Bell, solid, good guys that I was so hard on--yet I liked. They’ll never understand my true feelings about them because I was so outwardly hard on them.

“I was so overly concerned with emotions and (how a player projects himself) on the field, I lost sight of the fact that how these people needed to be treated.”

Such people as . . .

Dave Stewart:

“I’m going to sit down and talk to Dave this spring,” Rader said. “I thought Dave Stewart had all the ability in the world and tried to do the best I could to get it out of him. Obviously, my approach wasn’t correct.”

Jim Sundberg:

“In the winter of 1983, I made a statement about Jim Sundberg and backed ourselves into a corner where we actually had to trade the guy, and that was a terrible thing that I did,” Rader said.

“I went in there with some preconceptions regarding some veteran players. To their credit, they were good people and good players, but they weren’t as emotionally strong as I was led to believe. I got disappointed in them and made public statements that alienated them to the point where either they couldn’t play to their ability or we had to do something with them.

“That was the case with Jim Sundberg. . . . I don’t know if it was immaturity or stupidity or a combination of all of the above. It certainly was a terrible mistake.”

And then, there was the Texas media:

“I did a terrible job with them. Terrible job,” Rader said. “I took everything very personally and it got to the point where, no matter what happened with the ballclub, I took it upon myself to defend whatever negative statements were made about the team.

“I got so out of line with my protests and the exception I took to anything written that was negative that I became terrible. I was hard and mean with them, short-tempered and sarcastic, all that stuff.

“I look back on that and say to myself, ‘You really were an idiot.’ You wonder how you could’ve been so stupid. I was just so eager and so proud and so determined. I really thought I could do it. It was the wrong approach--in everything. It was just unbelievable.”

A once-promising managerial career had seemingly flamed out before the age of 40. As he shuttled from job to job and organization to organization--Chicago White Sox coach in 1986-87, Angel scout in 1988--Rader figured his name had just about sunk to the bottom in the major league managerial pool.

When Angel vice president Mike Port came calling last November, searching for a replacement for Cookie Rojas, Rader admitted to being surprised.

“Yeah, I was,” he said. “There are so many negative things out there floating around about me that I thought I’d never get another opportunity. I pretty much resigned myself to that fact.”

So, why, in fact, did Port come calling?

You can count the reasons on 12 fingers--one for each loss in the streak that ended the Angels’ 1988 season. If ever a team needed a kick in the rudder, the Angels are it. Port is hoping the introduction of Rader to this club will bring with it a healthy dose of adrenaline--and gambling that the mix isn’t too potent.

“Doug Rader has a lot of enthusiasm,” Port said. “He’s a player’s manager, he’s been through it before and he should benefit from the vantage point of being on the side burner the past few years. He brings us a leadership element.”

Port also knew Rader as a player when both were in the San Diego Padre organization. So, too, were Bob Fontaine, currently Angels’ director of scouting, and Bill Bavasi, Angels’ minor league director.

For that, Rader is thankful.

“They knew me back when I was with San Diego and basically how I was back then,” Rader said. “The way I ended up in Texas, thank goodness they either didn’t pay attention or know me at that point.”

The Texas Doug Rader wasn’t the real Doug Rader, he insists.

“When I went into Texas, I tried to be a certain way,” Rader said. “I wanted to be as hard, as tough, as demanding as I could possibly be. I forced myself to be that way because of the shape the organization was in.

“The people that know me only from that period of time think that’s really the way I am, but in reality, it wasn’t.”

Even former foil Stewart will concede this point.

“I know Doug two ways,” Stewart said. “When he was managing Hawaii, I played against him in the minors and his players would give an arm and a leg for him. They played hard for him. But, that was in a winning situation.

“In Texas, we weren’t winning and he pressed. . . . Probably the one thing I can say on his behalf is that Texas was a tough situation, especially for a first managerial job. I could see how that could’ve caused changes in anybody. And from what I knew in triple-A, Doug went through definite changes in Texas.”

Stewart bore the brunt of one of Rader’s most infamous outbursts, during a 1985 spring training game at Pompano Beach, Fla. At the time, Stewart was a struggling young reliever experimenting with a new pitch. Eventually, the forkball became the pitch that transformed Stewart into a two-time 20-game winner, but on this day, it wound up in the outfield bleachers.

As Stewart watched the flight of the home run, he turned around and smiled.

Rader turned red. Soon, Rader was charging the mound, chewing out the pitcher in full view of teammates and spectators.

Appearances always meant a lot to Rader, a perpetually bloody-kneed third baseman in his playing days.

“I didn’t want something bad to happen to the ballclub and have one of our players take it lightly,” Rader said. “I had this thing about outward appearances, about showing you were tougher than that.”

Stewart tolerated the lecture, but he couldn’t deal with the site or the timing.

“By all rules of the game, he showed me up,” Stewart said. “It was always taught to me that if you have a beef with a player, you should make it away from the public and his teammates. It’s a common courtesy, but Doug didn’t display that with me.

“What made it tougher was that, at the time, I was struggling, too. I needed something more positive from him than what I got.”

Instead, Rader demoted Stewart, moving him from short to middle relief after seven regular-season appearances. By the end of August, both Rader and Stewart were ex-Rangers.

--Other incidents:

Henke, another pitcher who blossomed after leaving Texas, was characterized as gutless by Rader after losing an extra-inning game in Cleveland.

“It was one of those games where we’d go ahead in the eighth, they’d tie it, we’d go ahead in the ninth, they’d tie it, we’d go ahead in the 10th and they’d score two to beat us,” Rader said. “There were runs scoring on wild pitches. It wasn’t very pretty.

“Tom was pitching and he’d walk a guy, and then that guy would come around and score on a wild pitch. The comment I made afterwards was made in passing and not to Tom. I said, ‘I don’t think he has the guts to throw the ball over the plate.’

“Later, the thing got capsulized and conveniently modified to where I had chastised him as being gutless. The thing is, I probably made him feel he was gutless by how I treated him and how I used him. I was undoubtedly guilty of that.”

In the winter of 1984-85, the Rangers left Henke unprotected and he was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays. Henke saved 27 games for Toronto in 1986, 34 in 1987 and 25 in 1988.

--Sundberg was publicly criticized in similar fashion for lacking the tobacco-spitting machismo Rader wanted in all his players. Soon after, he was traded, dealt in late 1983 to the Milwaukee Brewers for another catcher, Ned Yost.

“We made the deal because Ned Yost is a better catcher than Jim Sundberg, period,” Rader said then. This even though Yost was a .233 hitter who had thrown out 16 of 101 base stealers in his major league career.

Yost lasted one season with Texas. Sundberg went on to Kansas City and the World Series and is now back with the Rangers.

--Arlington Stadium fans also drew the wrath of Rader during one bad stretch in June, 1984. Booed by the home crowd after deciding to remove starting pitcher Mike Mason in the ninth inning of a game against the Angels, Rader returned to the dugout screaming at the fans, “He’s out of gas, you . . . “

Rader was not into public relations during those days.

Toward the end, he also bullied reporters.

In Texas, writers tell the story of how Rader, in a postgame fit of rage, flung his clothes from a rack across his office, the pants landing on the head of a reporter--where they remained for the rest of the interview.

Or, of how Rader answered one writer’s questions with the same two-word expletive for 10 straight days.

Or, of how a Dallas sports editor arranged a hatchet-burying meeting with Rader, which Rader quickly ended with another two-word expletive.

Great moments in detente, it wasn’t.

“We kind of built up a self-fulfilling prophecy on both sides,” Rader says, looking back. “(The writers) expected me to be a . . . , and I didn’t disappoint them. I expected them to rip me, and they didn’t disappoint me.

“It kept snowballing to where there was no way out. It was a joke.”

The only way out, it developed, was Rader’s dismissal in May, 1985. And when he finally was fired, Rader called it a relief.

“It was one of those deals where I hoped it would happen,” he said. “It was a situation that couldn’t resolve itself with me still being there. It couldn’t have gotten better with me there. A change had to be made.”

So, what does all this portend for the Angels in 1989?

Rader, 44, insists he has changed. He says he will delegate more authority to his coaching staff and not try to shoulder the whole burden, as he did before. The skin is now thicker, he says, and the fuse on his temper longer.

He claims that the mistakes of Texas won’t be repeated in Anaheim.

“I really owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people for making (the mistakes) sound as bad as they were,” Rader said. “If it hadn’t been hammered into me so many times, I wouldn’t have learned my lesson as well as I have.

“(And) if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: I haven’t come in with any preconceptions. I listened to what people have said about the players here and their pluses and minuses, but I’m much slower to pass judgment on players.”

And, he says, more careful to judge them as individuals.

“I think I might be smart enough to get a handle on a guy, an approach for each guy,” he said. “There’s not one all-encompassing edict, where you disregard the frailties of the players as individuals. Let’s sit down and look at this a little more closely. Dickie Schofield may need this, Willie Fraser may need that, Bert Blyleven needs this, Lance Parrish needs that.

“I think I’m much more capable to make this kind of evaluation now.”

Merv Rettenmund, the Oakland Athletics’ hitting instructor who played with and coached for Rader in Texas, agrees.

“Doug has changed. A lot,” Rettenmund said. “You could say he’s mellowed. He’s going to be a lot different than the way he was in Texas.

“Half the stuff he did in Texas was not for the betterment of the game, but he did it to get the players cranked up. . . . He has a great mind. He’s not at all like he appears, a big, tough guy. He’s just the opposite--a smart guy, a sincere guy.

“I think he’s also gratified to get the job with the Angels. I know he wants to do a good job on the major league level.”

Rader simply says: “I want to do it right. That’s my goal. Not to show people that they were wrong--because they weren’t wrong. The way I was before, they were right. I just want to do the best possible job in every way, the way I treat people and what I expect of people.”

And, as even Stewart will allow, “Everybody deserves another chance. Doug is very knowledgeable and he had great success managing at the minor league level. If he gets in a good situation with the Angels, he could have success there, too.”

Stewart can speak from experience on the value of second chances. He got his in Oakland and made the most of it.

Now, Doug Rader has his.