White Made Minor Trip, Major Changes : Angels: While in Edmonton, he made adjustments to his stroke, which he hopes will lead to upswing in his average.

Devon White leaned back in the Angel dugout, putting his ballplayer’s mental calculator to work. Games remaining, at-bats and hits clicked through his mind, and he spit out an average.

“There’s a full month and a half left--much can be done,” White said, softly pounding his fist into his glove. “I’ve got at least 150 more at-bats, probably, if I play every day. If I can hit .400, that might get me all the way to .260.”

It is a very long way back.

White, the Angels’ center fielder, is hitting .217 with 45 games remaining, his season a disappointment of proportions exceeded only by the struggles of Mark Langston.

But White is with the Angels, which was not the case in early July when he celebrated the first anniversary of making the American League All-Star team by being demoted to triple-A Edmonton. The Angels were starting a three-game series in Milwaukee on July 6, and Colleen White was on her way to join her husband. He met her at the airport with the news that he was being sent down.

White spent about two weeks with the Trappers, where he consulted Joe Maddon, the Angels’ minor league hitting instructor.

He missed 18 games, returning July 28. Since then:

--In his first three games back, he went five for 12.

--In his first six, he hit .296.

--In his past nine, he has fallen into a seven-for-37 slump, a .189 average.

There is progress, then regression. Which is real?

“To do things differently in a physical way is very, very difficult,” Angel Manager Doug Rader said. “You have to retrain the muscles. That takes an incredible amount of correct repetition. He’s working extremely hard at that. I think he’s making progress. . . . There’s just a tendency to lapse into problem areas he had before. It’s going to be a little inconsistent for a while. As long as he continues to work as hard as he has, it’s going to work out for him and us.”

If White hits .300 the rest of the way, he would raise his average to only .243, which would still be the lowest of his four-year major league career.

“I’m not out here being content,” White said at Anaheim Stadium Wednesday after taking batting practice at 4 p.m., before many players arrived for the 7:30 game. “Every day, I’m trying to improve my numbers. If I get 40 or 50 more hits the rest of the year, I’ll finish pretty decent. Anything above .260 would be good.”

White paused, looked at the teammates surrounding him and laughed.

“No,” he said, “anything above . 215 would be good.”

One criticism of White has been that he tries too hard to hit home runs, attempting to match his output of 24 in 1987, instead of simply trying to get on base, where his exceptional speed translates into runs for the Angels.

When he hit a home run Tuesday night against the New York Yankees, it was only his ninth this season.

“Home runs, you have to forget ‘em,” White said. “When you’re hitting .215, you have to forget ‘em. If you have 20 of them, that’s something. But I don’t have 20. I’m not hitting for power, I’m not getting on base. I’m not stealing.”

He is working hard, however.

“It’s easy when you come out and work every day,” White said. “When you forget--not forget, but when you don’t practice the things you’ve worked on--you’re forgetting the thing you went out to do.”

While White was with Edmonton, Maddon worked with him extensively. They have known each other since 1981, when White was at Idaho Falls in his first professional season and Maddon was beginning his managerial career there.

“At first, I wasn’t sure (how White would react to being demoted),” Maddon said. “You get a major league player coming back to the minor leagues and you don’t know if there will be bitterness attached, if they’ll be annoyed, or if they’ll come back willing to work. Before I met him at the airport, there were a lot of things to think about, like what frame of mind he’d be in. While he was getting his baggage, I knew he was fine. He was there to work and felt as if he deserved to be sent there. We absolutely knew it wasn’t permanent. The man has the potential to be an All-Star center fielder for many years to come.”

Maddon and White concentrated on shortening White’s swing and getting him to swing more with his hands and less with his arms. They worked on thinking at the plate, trying to train White to focus with a two-strike count, to cut down the strikeouts, which are coming this season at a rate of one every 3.76 at-bats, up from one every 4.90 at-bats last year.

Back in Anaheim, he continues to work under Deron Johnson, the Angel batting instructor, who watches over White as he takes early batting practice. So does Dave Winfield, who is helping out with some of the struggling Angels.

“People with an abundance of talent, you want to see them realize it,” Winfield said.

With bullpen coach Joe Coleman throwing batting practice, White stood in Wednesday, taking his swings.

With one swing, the ball trickled off his bat, a weak grounder to shortstop.

“Oh, come on,” White chided himself. “Seven more,” he told Coleman.

“Seven?” Coleman said. “You usually say five.”

“I wanted to say 10, but I’m getting tired,” White said.

White took a few more swings, one a line drive to left field.

“Perfect,” Johnson said.

Another swing, and Winfield interrupted.

“Hold it, hold it. I don’t want you to get up too high.”

White hit another easy grounder, this one to third base.

“Urgghh,” he grumbled. “Three more, Joe.”

Winfield and Johnson stood by, watching intently.

“Sometimes players drift in and out of doing things correctly,” Winfield said. “Some know when they’re doing that. The key for anybody is to know what is correct, and to practice correctly. The really good hitters practice it correctly every day at batting practice and in every at-bat.”

White sees that, and blames getting away from it for his most recent backslide.

“I just think I wasn’t practicing the right things,” he said.

His play since returning has been promising and then disappointing. He has bunted for a base hit and sacrificed, both rarities at one time. He has homered twice. He has struck out with the bases loaded.

“Since I’ve been (in the major leagues) the last two years, I’ve been anxious trying to do too much and putting a lot of pressure on myself,” White said. “It pulled me away from my regular habits. . . . When they sent me down, it was more pressure. It was pressure for me to perform and get back up here.”

When this season is over, there is little telling what will happen to this Angel team. Speculation is that there will be many changes on a team picked to contend in the AL West but instead is near the bottom.

White knows one thing: He probably won’t be going back to Edmonton.

“That was my last option,” White said. “The only thing that could happen to me now is being traded or being released . . . Whatever happens is going to happen. I don’t have any power over it. I struggled the whole year. Just finishing up strong, I don’t think that would make too much difference.”

Angel Notes

Infielder Mark McLemore, whose future is uncertain after returning from a Palm Springs rehabilitation assignment, did not go with the Angels on a 10-game trip Thursday. He can not be optioned to the minors without clearing waivers.