LOOSE OVER LOSING

The tall fellow enters the Beverly Hills office. The shades are drawn. The room is dark and cool. A soothing voice coaxes him to lie down on the couch, close his eyes, relax.

Nolan Ryan takes half the advice.

"I was lying there with one eye open," he said of the 1976 visit to a hypnotist, "making sure he doesn't slip up on me."

The memory forced his smile.

"He had the wrong cat."

A person must want to be hypnotized before it will take, Ruth Ryan noted. She figured her husband would be a poor candidate, despite belief among California Angels management that hypnosis might do Ryan' s control problems and failing confidence some good. Ryan was willing to try almost anything, though he apparently forgot where he was when he said it.

"That," Ruth said, "was California."

And the Ryans are Alvin, Texas.

They were not easily swept up in fads that swell on the West Coast and wash over the rest of the country. Several members of the Los Angeles Dodgers had undergone hypnosis treatment with Arthur Ellen. Maury Wills went to Ellen out of his irrational fears that he might hurt his legs while stealing bases. Others followed, for everything from fear of flying to smoking. The Angels thought Ryan might need a little mental tune-up. They didn't know what else to make of his record, which would droop to 17-18, his first losing season in five with the Angels. His elbow didn't hurt anymore, or not much. He had no physical problems, convincing management it was a mental block.

"It was a culmination of his career, too," said Harry Dalton, then the Angels' general manager and now a senior vice president in the Milwaukee Brewers' organization. "I thought, 'Heck, something's keeping Nolan from throwing it over the plate. Let's give it a try.'"

The session did little more than confirm Ryan's apprehension. But it made him think, too. He conceded his "head wasn't screwed on straight." He lost confidence because of problems re-establishing the rhythm of his motion after elbow surgery. He compensated for the elbow, which often was stiff, deadening his fastball.

But, despite the problems and doubts of management as well as media, Ryan enjoyed the 1976 season. The surgery alleviated most of the pain. The joint would catch at times, troubling him. An injection of cortisone took care of it, and he pitched on.

He was not dominating, as he had been prior to 1975. He did not throw a no-hitter, the first time he had not done so since 1972. He did not win more than two consecutive games until the last six weeks of the season, when he won seven of his last eight.

All in all, he considered it a good year.

"When you go through a year like I did in '75," he said, "it makes you appreciate certain things. Being healthy and not being in pain are two of the most important."

He wasn't sure of his health when he went to spring training. He hadn't done much more than toss the ball around. He'd had no pain but wondered if he would have his fastball.

He thought about it all winter, the possibility that age and injury had caught his fastball and would not return it.

"The aging process is real frustrating," said Ryan, who postponed it longer than most. "All of us deal with it differently."

Ryan didn't deal with it well. He had listened to people tell him all he needed to do to control his wildness was to take a little off the fastball. Back off a bit. He knew he couldn't. He did not have enough confidence in his other pitches. His curve had only recently come under control. It would take another eight years before his change- up would become effective.

He knew it was the fastball or nothing. In the spring of 1976, he wasn't sure which it would be.

"We're not pessimistic," said Ruth, who remembered the spring training of 1976 primarily because she went with two children, Reid and newborn Reese, named after one of the Angels' coaches, Jimmie Reese. "But, every year, we always thought, well, he's had a good career. We could go on without it.

"We were really thinking that in '76."

Ryan's fastball came around by the end of spring training. He never became comfortable on the mound, however. He could not correct bad habits he had picked up. The elbow problems and surgery ruined his motion, refined under Tom Morgan's guidance in Ryan's first two seasons with the Angels. Without Morgan, Ryan didn't know how to correct it.

He lost five consecutive decisions in May and had another four-game losing streak in July. Reporters began to speculate that his elbow had gone bad again. He told them the truth about his rhythm problems. No one believed him and he didn't blame them. He had covered up about his elbow the year before, temporarily damaging his credibility.

He better handled the pressure from the media, though, having learned from the previous season what it was like to run from the truth.

He didn't have to run in 1977. He was becoming less and less the focus of the team, at least in the media. Frank Tanana, a left-hander who won 19 games in his fourth season with the Angels, was new and certainly more exciting. Tanana was born in Detroit but he had California style. He lived fast and threw faster. He dated movie stars and had a 96 mph fastball. And, unlike Ryan, he generally knew where the ball would finish. He had 261 strikeouts in 1976, 66 fewer than Ryan, who led the league. But he also had only 73 walks, nearly a third of Ryan' s league-leading 183.

Ruth remembered comparisons of Ryan and Tanana to Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the great Dodger pitching tandem of the '60s. But no one would make the mistake of pairing Tanana and Ryan in the same category off the field.

"We weren't real close because of the difference in lifestyle," Ryan said. "In time, it affected his pitching."

Ryan didn't resent Tanana's encroachment of his fame. He was relieved, really, as the team's other figures occupied the media.

Bill Melton, the third baseman, challenged manager Dick Williams on the team bus late in July and won, in a sense. The Angels fired Williams, a caustic manager who would not go down as one of Ryan's favorites, a few days later.

Tanana's good days with the Angels would not last much longer, either. He hurt a tendon in his left triceps muscle before the 1977 All-Star break. Overthrowing, he said. He favored the injury, hindering his pitching style. His strikeouts decreased by 50 the next season as his fastball petered out. By 1979, his shoulder was shot.

He hung on, though. He went from California to Boston, then Texas and Detroit and now the New York Mets, at 39. His fastball, once a rival of Ryan's, tops out in the mid-80s, about the speed of a Ryan change-up. Tanana, the former party boy, gets by on guile and the discipline he learned as a born-again Christian.

"We're a lot closer now," Ryan said, a description that works more ways than he knows.