The Buck’s Not Ready to Stop : Baseball: Thoughts of the bus accident are fading, recovery is progressing and the Angel manager says he will return to the dugout after the All-Star game.

Medication and time have dulled the pain of his broken bones, but the terrible, trapped feeling still hits at odd moments, bringing back every moment of Buck Rodgers’ horror.

When it strikes, the Angels’ manager wills himself to remember that he’s safe and cared for, no longer pinned in the twisted steel of the team bus on the side of a hill in New Jersey.

“I had flashbacks. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and be looking down the hill with spotlights in my eyes,” Rodgers said. “I still get cold sweats.”

Those flashbacks are fewer now, four weeks after the May 21 accident that left him with a broken right wrist and shattered right elbow, a broken left knee and two cracked ribs. Twelve other people--including driver Carl Venetz--were injured when the bus swerved off the road en route from New York to Baltimore, but Rodgers’ injuries were the most serious. The accident is still under investigation.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the accident, Rodgers was upbeat during a news conference in the garden of his Yorba Linda home.

“I’ve been a model patient,” he said, smiling. “I didn’t cry much.”

In a wheelchair, he wore sweat pants and a shawl over the cast on his left leg. His right arm was in a protective splint, but he displayed X-rays of his elbow, pointing out the V-shaped plates doctors inserted during a five-hour operation at Centinela Hospital Medical Center and joking: “I’m going to have a tough time going through airport security systems.”

He won’t have to worry about that for a while. Rodgers plans to visit Anaheim Stadium this weekend but won’t resume managing before the two-week home stand after the All-Star break. He hopes to take his first steps in three weeks, two weeks sooner than expected.

The elbow damage will keep him off the golf course for a year and in physical therapy for a while. Because of muscle atrophy, he said: “That arm is like a piece of string.”

Combing his hair is an ordeal, and completing his exercises is as difficult for him as it is for Judy, his wife of 34 years.

“I’m having a little bit of a hard time,” she said. “They asked me to help with his therapy, and when he’s doing that he’s in pain. That’s hard for me to see.”

Quipped Rodgers: “My wife doesn’t like to see me in pain unless she’s inflicting it. She knows I’m not in pain anymore, that I’m getting sassier every day. . . . She’s ready for (him to take) a 14-day road trip.”

That day is still far off, but he intends to return to the Angels’ dugout as soon as he can walk.

“I don’t want to come back in a wheelchair,” he said. “I think a manager has to have a certain presence around the clubhouse, and I don’t think coming back on crutches or in a wheelchair, you can have that.

“I just miss the activity of the game and the whole stage of the game, everything that happens around it. I even miss the bitching and moaning. I miss the decision making. My biggest decision now is whether to have grape juice or apple juice.”

Surviving the crash “gives you a little jolt in the priority department,” he said. “I’m alive. I’m here. I’m talking to you. Like one of the cards I got, the front said ‘You may be banged up, but you haven’t got one of these,’ and you open it up and it’s a DOA tag.”

Rodgers sat in the first row on the right side of the bus, traditionally the manager’s seat, but his recollection of the accident is cloudy.

“I remember going down a mountain and a forest of trees coming through the windshield,” he said. “Then I remember the driver saying, ‘I lost it,’ or someone saying ‘I lost it.’ I was engaged in the movie on the VCR, so I didn’t see us go down. . . . I thought I had it made and that I would walk away with nothing until we hit that last tree. I was in the front pew like a sardine. It seemed like we were going downhill for a long time. . . .

“When we got down to the bottom and hit the tree, I knew my elbow was hurt. It was hanging down, just swinging. It was a bag of bones. . . .

“(When paramedics arrived) there was a young guy tromping all over my foot. He said, ‘I found one! I found one, but I think he’s dead.’ I said, ‘I’m not dead, just get off my damned foot.’ ”

Rodgers said he ducked glass from the shattered windows by diving between his seat and the partition in front of his row.

After being sent to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, he called Judy, who was home.

“He said, ‘They’ll patch me up and I’ll be on the field the next day,’ ” she said. “I guess he didn’t want to worry me.”

Or himself.

“I didn’t think anything was wrong with my leg, and I just wanted her to know I wasn’t critical,” he said. “It was nothing life-threatening, and if it was just a break in my arm, I could be back the next day. Once I came out of anesthetic and they told me my wrist was broken, the ribs were cracked, my tibia was fractured and my elbow was crushed, then I started getting realistic. I knew I wasn’t going to be back tomorrow.”

In the month he has been gone, the Angels fell to last in the American League West, then rebounded and have won six of their last seven games. He watches the club on TV when he can, feeling increasingly distanced. He speaks frequently with interim Manager John Wathan--he told Wathan to use his desk and office, which Wathan has avoided--but isn’t dictating the lineup.

He does discuss personnel moves with the coaches and Senior Vice President Whitey Herzog, though.

“I was really frustrated and I know the team was frustrated during the period after the accident and shortly before,” he said. “I felt really frustrated, because at that point you feel you have the pulse of the club, and the longer you’re away, the more you’re like a fan. . . .

“John Wathan has the toughest job in the world. I was an interim manager (in Milwaukee) after George Bamberger had his heart attack. You’re the boss, but you’re not the boss. . . . I like to watch them play good and they’re playing good now.”

The ultimate test of his recovery will be when he rejoins the team for a trip.

“I’ve never been a white-knuckle guy, but it’ll be interesting next time I get on a bus,” he said. “I’m thinking we ought to designate that first seat as where we put the trash cans and stuff.”

* NO NIGHTMARE

The Dodgers’ disappointing start is not merely a bad dream, and nobody knows that better than Vice President Fred Claire. He created it. C8