Rodgers Must Remain Off Left Knee for Two Months

Angel Manager Buck Rodgers will be unable to bear weight on his surgically repaired left knee for two months, and doctors who also operated on his badly fractured right elbow Sunday said it’s possible Rodgers will lose some flexibility in that joint because of the extent of the injury he suffered in Thursday’s bus accident.

Rodgers, 53, was the most seriously injured of the 12 players, coaches and staff members hurt when one of two team buses traveling from New York to Baltimore ran off the New Jersey Turnpike and into a grove of trees in Deptford Township, N.J., about 15 miles from Philadelphia. Rodgers spent Thursday and Friday nights at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia before being flown to California Saturday. Lewis Yocum, the Angels’ team orthopedist, teamed with physicians Bob Chandler and Bill Montgomery to perform the surgery on Rodgers Sunday at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood.

Rodgers was in an observation room Sunday and is scheduled to be transferred to a regular room today if no complications arise. He is expected to remain in the hospital at least three or four days to make sure his condition stabilizes and that he develops no infections.

An Angel spokesman also said first baseman Alvin Davis, who sustained a bruised kidney in the accident, no longer had blood in his urine, which made doctors optimistic about Davis being able to play this week. Three other members of the traveling party--head trainer Ned Bergert, traveling secretary Frank Sims and bullpen catcher Rick Turner--flew back to California Saturday and will recuperate at their homes.

The damage to Rodgers’ left knee, technically known as a fractured tibial plateau, was repaired in an hour-long operation. Doctors then turned their attention to his elbow, which had been shattered on impact when the bus tipped onto its right side and came to rest on a tree.

Yocum said he found “much more fragmentation” in Rodgers’ elbow than X-rays and CAT scans had led him to expect, and he also found enough soft tissue damage to cast doubt on whether Rodgers will recover full mobility in the elbow. However, Yocum said the damage might have been worse.

“It could have come through the skin,” he said. “(But) this is almost as complex a fracture as you can get without it being compound (fractured bones that pierce the skin).”

Yocum said the surgical team used two screws to repair Rodgers’ knee, and metal plates, several screws and wire to reassemble his elbow. On both joints, the doctors performed procedures called open reduction and internal fixation, which Yocum defined as opening the wound to determine the amount of damage and putting the pieces back together.

Having three surgeons working on Rodgers enabled them to complete their task in one day, rather than subjecting Rodgers to separate procedures. “It helps to have a team working on it,” Yocum said. “Five hours for any surgery is long, period. But in order to get the pieces back together, you have to take as much time as is required.”