BASEBALL / DAILY REPORT : ANGELS : Finley Recovery a Slow Process

There is no timetable set for Chuck Finley, who is being held off the mound as he recovers from surgery on his left big toe Dec. 5. Finley graduated from soft toss to 15 minutes of long toss without difficulty Sunday, but the Angels are proceeding cautiously, even if that might ultimately mean he isn’t ready for the start of the season.

“It doesn’t make sense to rush him to get ready for the season and then have to shut him down for a month,” team orthopedist Lewis Yocum said, adding that Finley has shown progress during the past two weeks.

The Angels have said Finley could be on the mound as soon as next week, but it might not be for considerably longer. Yocum said three months to six months is a “fair estimate” of recovery time for other athletes after similar surgery. The operation was to remove bits of bone resulting from the “crumbling” of one of the two small bones that are beneath the larger one in Finley’s big toe on the left foot--the push-off foot for a left-handed pitcher.

“I’m going to prepare like he’s not going to be there,” Manager Buck Rodgers said. “I can only do it that way. If he’s there, that’s a plus, and we eliminate the No. 5 starter. We can’t hope Chuck Finley is going to start the season being one of our starting pitchers. We certainly want him to, but we can’t sit around hoping. We’ve got to pick five starters without Chuck Finley.”

Finley pitched through last season after first being bothered by the toe during spring training.

“He’s evidently got a high threshold for pain,” Rodgers said. “I know hundreds of pitchers who wouldn’t even go out and attempt to pitch with what he’s had. You want that. The question is, at what point is it to his disadvantage.

“We’ve talked with Chuck about how he has to be up front with us. If we put him on the mound in a week and it’s bothering him, we’ve got to get him off the mound.

“I think we have to go on a combination of what he says and what we see.”

The day after suffering a dislocated right hip in a fall on the field, Preston Gomez, 68, returned to Gene Autry Park and watched workouts from a chair behind a batting cage. Gomez, a former major league manager, is a special assistant to the Angels.

“I don’t know how you keep him down; he may be tougher to keep down than Chuck Finley,” Rodgers said. “He’s a gamer. He always has been. He said, ‘Get me out of this . . . hospital and get me back on the field. You can’t see any players from a hospital bed.’ ”