Rodgers Proves Laughter Is the Best Medicine

The fringed maroon shawl just wasn’t him.

Neither was the wheelchair. Nor the arm sling. Nor the leg cast. Nor the helping hands that were required to push his burly 200 pounds through the sliding glass door and onto the back-yard patio.

But Buck Rodgers looked good. Fantastic, as a matter of fact, for someone who not only has to manage the Angels but who also managed to absorb the brunt of the May 21 accident that mangled a team bus bound from New York to Baltimore.

Rodgers has a broken kneecap, a broken elbow, a broken wrist and two broken ribs, but his spirit is back off the DL. Thursday morning, Rodgers not only invited the local media to his house for cookies, cola and quotes, but spent a good hour with them, chatting and joshing and displaying X-ray negatives as if they were photos of a daughter’s high school graduation.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Rodgers said as he brandished an X-ray of his newly reconstructed elbow, held together by a V-shaped fixture of a screw and two metal plates.

Was that an arm or an Erector Set?

“I’ve got screws and pins and plates and, I think, some bailing wire in there,” Rodgers joked. “I’m going to have a hard time going through the airport security system for a while.”

Rodgers passed around another X-ray.

“I had so many X - rays, I thought I was going to start to glow,” he said. “Every place I went, head to toe, head to toe . . .

“They took me to three hospitals before they finally did the surgery. Jersey to Philly and then back to Inglewood. I asked them why they couldn’t do it back east. The doctors saw the X-rays back there and said, ‘Pass.’ ”

Rodgers’ elbow was crushed in the accident--so badly, he says, that Dr. Lewis Yocum “took all the chips and the flakes, ground them up and put them back into the bone like mortar.”

Now Rodgers sits and waits for time to heal.

The good news is that he expects to return as the Angels’ acting manager within a month, some time during the team’s first home stand after the All-Star break.

The bad news is that he won’t be able to swing a golf club for nine to 12 months--and his back yard overlooks the 14th fairway at Yorba Linda Country Club.

All this spare time . . . and all that plush green grass, just lying there in front of him, taunting him.

“My typical day is not too exciting now,” Rodgers said. “I get up in the morning, have my coffee, read the paper, eat my breakfast. Then, the real big part of the morning is when they bring the portable toilet over. That’s a very important part of the morning.

“Then, they wheel me out on the patio--I love to sit on the patio--and friends call. (Chuck) Tanner called yesterday, and we talked for about 40 minutes. Then I have lunch. Then the physical therapist comes over at 2, and he kills me for an hour.

“Then I wipe the sweat off my brow and sit around some more.”

Four weeks after the crash, Rodgers is off painkillers, although he might have found some use for Demarol during the long days and nights of watching the Angels from afar.

“It was awful,” Rodgers said of the Angels’ free fall through the AL West standings. “I could feel the whole thing. In Milwaukee, in Chicago, it was tough to watch. I could see the agony . . .

“I was just hoping the guys didn’t feel sorry for me and that I hadn’t become a reason for the slump. During that whole thing, I didn’t want to be a negative effect on it.”

Full recovery would seem more likely for Rodgers than for the team he left behind, but some encouraging signs have been detected in the past week. A three-game sweep of Kansas City. Two out of three against Texas.

“Everybody’s been trying like the devil,” Rodgers said, “and finally, (Bert) Blyleven and (Mark) Langston stepped forward. They’ve kind of led the Charge of the Light Brigade.

“Everybody could’ve said, ‘The hell with it,’ but they didn’t. And this was a tough home stand--Wally and Kansas City, Nolan and Texas. It could’ve been one of those roll-over-and-play dead home stands, but it didn’t turn out that way. I’m proud of the way the team’s come back.”

Rodgers also singled out the return of Junior Felix--”He’s helped our offense both mentally and physically”--which brings us to a point worth deliberating: The Angels’ near-cataclysmic trading of Felix to Boston for Jack Clark.

Jackie Autry reportedly vetoed the deal, and if she did, it’s the glittering highlight of career in her baseball management.

And if she did, Rodgers is glad she did.

“Right now, Junior Felix is our best offensive player,” Rodgers said. “Jack Clark’s having a tough year, and you don’t know how many good years he has left.”

(Memo to Whitey: You already have Von Hayes and Hubie Brooks. About this fixation with the 1985 National League East-- let it go. )

Besides, Rodgers doesn’t need any more scares. He’s still a trauma patient on the mend. No unnecessary excitement, please.

In a month or so, Rodgers hopes to return to the Angels, a manager back in one piece.

When he gets there, he wants to find the Angels in the same condition.