Managing Is an Exercise in Patience for Rader : Angels: After guiding his team to a surprising 91-71 finish last year, he faces more expectations in his second season.

Doug Rader, once the Red Rooster and ruler of third base, is crowing.

The Angels’ manager, his hair faded to gray but his competitiveness no less fiery, is exulting over his first day of an exercise program designed to work the kinks out of a body that he used as a human backboard for 11 years. Slowly, intently, he lifts a handweight that stretches the protesting muscles in his sore right shoulder.

“Hey, look at me,” he calls to players walking by. “I lifted three pounds. How do you like that!”

The humor is self-deprecating, obscuring the magnitude of that small movement. Rader had every right to crow about his seemingly modest lift and the greater feat that he performed last season, when he took a team that finished 12 games below .500 in 1988 and lifted it into the American League West pennant race for most of the summer. But this rooster won’t crow about himself, content instead to be one character in an ensemble cast.

“Good managing is usually a byproduct of good coaching and good playing,” said Rader, who begins his second season with the Angels tonight when they face Seattle at Anaheim Stadium. “Any credit needs to be spread around. I don’t consider myself the focal point, and I’ll do everything I can to see that the credit goes where it belongs.

“Success comes from a group effort. If you want to talk to somebody who’s able to do a good job managing, look to the front office for providing good players and paying those players. Look at the coaching staff. Look at the internal leadership among the players. All we do here is keep the boat afloat.”

Although Rader worked hard at his craft, winning five Gold Gloves, playing in the major leagues was like a pleasure cruise, and he became known as the freest of spirits. Jim Bouton, in his book “Ball Four,” recorded Rader musing that he would have been happier as a Tahitian warlord or a pirate--and not the Pittsburgh variety. Rader urged Little Leaguers to eat baseball cards because “they have lots of information on them.” He sat on a birthday cake in the Astros’ clubhouse. And he once greeted house guests naked, which produced the desired effect of seeing them depart.

Rader once turned into Captain Queeg when he managed in Texas, following two seasons as a coach and three managing triple-A Hawaii of the Pacific Coast League. He cajoled, bullied and used his considerable intellect to lead the Rangers to first place in the AL West by the All-Star break in 1983, only to wilt with them in the unforgiving heat of Texas summers.

Rader uses words that would send most managers diving for a dictionary, and he is bent enough on self-improvement to have kept a journal for the past 4 1/2 years.

“It’s things I need to remember, things that affect me,” he said. “I go back to see whether the way I handled situations was the right way. It’s more a personal monitor than anything else.”

Rader is a man who has learned from his past, yet is reluctant to rehash it.

“I served my penance all last year and I don’t want to re-open it,” he said. “Penance is what it was. It was something I knew I had to deal with and I dealt with it and it’s over. I don’t want to be judged by what happened five years ago. Judge me by last year or the most recent past.”

Judging by last year, Rader is a new man, having learned to subdue his temper and fight for his players, not with them.

“He’s changed for the better,” said pitcher Mike Smithson, who was Rader’s 1983 opening day starter in Texas. Smithson was cut by the Angels Saturday.

“He’s very smart, scholarly smart. He’s book smart and street smart and that might be the most deadly combination . . . I can understand him not liking to talk about his past. It’s not fair to say he’s a flake or off the wall because he likes to have fun. I’ve been labeled a flake. Baseball has to have characters. That’s what makes the game the game.”

Angel pitcher Kirk McCaskill said he heard those crazy stories, like everybody else.

“What I’ve discovered and what’s important is his intelligence and how well-read he is,” McCaskill said. “He really helped me out a lot. He’s helped me learn how to relax and, at the same time, challenge me.

“He respects different personalities, and I hadn’t seen that in sports too much. It’s the wave of the future, good management techniques, to treat people as individuals whether in business or whatever. To bang everybody over the head is not always going to work. It’s hard to be friends with someone and maintain respect, especially in management. No one will cross Doug Rader, believe me. If they do, they’re not going to get away with it.”

Rader was 155-200 with the Rangers, who fired him 32 games into the 1985 season. After a coaching stint with the Chicago White Sox that included two games as interim manager, Rader was hired as a scout by Angel scouting director Bob Fontaine. It was the ideal job for Rader, who evaluated high school, college and free-agent talent in addition to visiting the Angels’ minor league affiliates.

“What happens to you is that you get stale easily,” Rader said. “I’d spent three years in Hawaii and two-plus years in Texas. Sometimes, change is good. I went back to coaching and had some very, very close relationships with the players in Chicago. The nature of scouting is such that you have to concern yourself with ability, not intangibles. I had gotten into a mind-set that if you had guys with really great intangibles, it would be OK. That wasn’t the case. You fall in love with a hustling, tough type of player as opposed to a player who has the ability to get you through the year.

“It was a very fortunate sequence of events, getting back to the basic sequence of things that need to be done. Most people say you can’t walk ‘til you crawl. I say you can’t crawl ‘til you roll.”

Having seen Rader roll with the punches, Angel General Manager Mike Port was convinced that Rader was the man to replace Cookie Rojas.

“He’s a very bright, intelligent, well-organized and capable individual who knows the game,” said Port, who was starting his executive career in San Diego when Rader was there in the late stages of his playing career. “I well understood and do understand the spirit in which a lot of (Rader’s escapades) were done. When people re-tell the stories, they become exaggerated as I knew them. The clubhouse pranksterism, we have the same thing today and a lot of people say it makes this a better club, like Bert (Blyleven). A lot of things Doug did were in the vein of clubhouse camaraderie. The dividing line was that (foul) line. When Doug went beyond that line, he’d play you ‘til the end of the day and beyond, if necessary.

“There was a tendency to hang a lot on Doug because of the Texas experience. What happened is he was trying to shoulder too much of the burden. The worse things got, the harder he tried and the larger his degree of frustration. It was a good first experience. Not all managers succeed the first time around. You put your foot in, appraise, readjust and go back in.

“The best thing about Doug Rader, aside from his baseball knowledge, is that he can be whatever he has to be with each player on the roster. He can walk the straight and narrow in the disciplinary sense, but the players also know he’s compassionate about them and their families.”

That’s a skill he learned in Chicago from Tony La Russa, now manager of the Oakland Athletics.

“He really has a good feel for the needs of other people,” Rader said of La Russa. “He understands the humanness of the people that are around him and he provides those people with what they need, criticism or instruction. It’s not like I’m patterning myself after him, but when you see someone do something correctly, you should be aware of how it works and you might possibly head in that direction.”

La Russa says Rader has headed in the right direction.

“I remember when we worked together, he said that if he got another chance (to manage), there were things he’d do differently,” La Russa said. “He recognized what he did right and wrong. I thought the old Doug Rader was real good. He was tough to play against. He was creative offensively and defensively, and he has a great idea about what he’s doing during the game.

“I admired the old Doug Rader. He’s a very sharp man and he’s got a lot of baseball in his background, and that’s a real good combination. I wish we had been together longer.”

Criticism seems unable to pierce Rader’s skin, but he acknowledges the barbs do sting. Still, he didn’t regard the Angels’ 91 victories last season as vindication for the criticisms he absorbed in Texas.

“It wasn’t a conscious effort to show anybody. It was more that I just wanted to do my job,” he said. “Criticism isn’t the greatest thing in the world to receive. It hurts. Most of (his indifference) is fake. You feel those things. I deal with it just like anybody else. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, and it’s possibly constructive. I listen to what people are criticizing and try to determine if it’s true. If it’s true, I try to do something to correct it, and if not I do my best to forget it . . . When I’m criticized, I have to list what’s true and what’s not. That has a tendency to keep you on an even keel, so you’re not working at extremes.”

Working under the lockout-shortened spring schedule was a trial for Rader, who is thorough and deliberate in each of his undertakings, be it scheduling off-season projects or devising a pitching rotation. He abhors chaos, carelessness and boredom, and he will not accept less devotion to the game from his players than he gives himself.

He was concerned, as spring training ended, whether the players had had enough time to become emotionally as well as physically prepared for the season. By Sunday, he felt “a lot better,” even if he couldn’t completely shake his unease.

“For someone who likes to be organized, it’s a situation that can’t be organized,” Rader said. “You have expectations but you can’t expect those expectations to become reality at a comparable time in spring training as in other years. It’s important to be patient and not worry about a player doing extremely well or extremely poorly.

“The thing that worries me more than anything else is that we’ve worked so hard to get a feel as a team. We haven’t been able to generate it yet. It might be there (today). When we left Palm Springs last year, I felt confident. This year, we haven’t been together long enough.

“(This season) is a completely different feel. It’s come so fast. When there’s so many things you’re unsure of, it takes your edge off. It’s not apprehension. (Pitching coach Marcel Lachemann) and I were talking, and I said, ‘What’s missing is the feeling within us.’ I think the players feel as though they’re ready, but we’ve conditioned ourselves to think that we’re not. So, we’ve got to be careful not to impart that kind of mind-set on them. I really feel as though they’re ready to start the season.”