THEY COULD SUE FOR . . .NON-SUPPORT : Must Pitchers Who Bear Down Also Bear Up With Fewer Runs?

Sit in the stands on any spring or summer night at Dodger Stadium and you’ll often hear a complaint from fans:

Why doesn’t Fernando Valenzuela get any hitting support from his teammates when he’s pitching?

Elsewhere in ballparks across the country, this lament is common whenever gifted pitchers go to the mound.

Valenzuela’s 8-8 record doesn’t correspond with his earned-run average of 2.34. He is only assured of not losing by throwing a shutout, which he has done four times this season.

Earlier in the season he had a string of 42 innings without yielding an earned run and was honored as the National League Pitcher of the Month for April. Yet, his record was only 2-3 at the time.

In his first five starts, the Dodgers scored a total of only eight runs, five coming in one game. Valenzuela has been involved in eight games (one no decision) in which the winning margin was only one run. He has a 3-4 record in those close encounters.

Valenzuela is accustomed to pitching with marginal support. Last year, he had a 12-17 record--yet his earned-run average was 3.03, 10th best in the National League.

He started 34 games and was involved in 13 games in which the Dodgers scored one run or less, along with 18 games in which the team scored two runs or less.

So there is statistical evidence that Valenzuela usually doesn’t have many runs to work with when he pitches.

But it’s a fallacy to say that he’s the only Dodger pitcher who isn’t backed up by consistent hitting, or that other pitchers of his caliber are similarly let down by their own hitters. It’s hardly a conspiracy. Consider:

--Last year, the Dodgers scored only 580 runs. That’s the first time the club had been under the 600-run mark since 1972, not including the 1981 strike-shortened season. The Dodgers averaged only 3.58 runs a game in 1984, a figure that would affect the entire pitching staff.

--The Dodgers are averaging 3.5 runs a game this year while batting .241, a ninth-place standing among the 12 National League teams.

--Valenzuela has benefited from only 53 runs in his 16 decisions. That’s an average of 3.3 runs a game, close to the club’s season average.

--The Dodgers have placed a burden on Valenzuela and the other pitchers by committing 80 errors. Los Angeles is contending with San Francisco for the major league lead in this negative category.

--Valenzuela has been involved in several low-scoring games, for he is occasionally matched against an opposing team’s star pitcher--Nolan Ryan, Dwight Gooden (twice), John Denny and Rick Sutcliffe. That factor--the entertainment value of aces confronting aces--is prevalent in the league.

--Statistician Seymour Siwoff of the Elias Sports Bureau says there is not enough data to support the notion that baseball’s best pitchers are singled out to starve on a paucity of runs.

“It’s simply not true,” he said.

--Joaquin Andujar (14-3) of the St. Louis Cardinals is wallowing in runs. In his 16 decisions, the Cardinals have averaged 6.6 runs behind him, better than their season average of 4.75.

That’s not surprising, though, considering that St. Louis leads the weak-hitting National League with a team batting average of .266.

--Dwight Gooden of the New York Mets isn’t as fortunate as Andujar. Still, he has an 11-3 record while getting only 52 runs--including four no decisions--in 18 games, an average of 3.06 compared to a season average of 3.43 runs a game.

Gooden survives his team’s anemic .229 average with a major league-leading ERA of 1.65.

--Houston’s hard-throwing Nolan Ryan (8-6) has benefited from an average of close to five runs a start compared to the Astros’ average of four runs a game for the season.

So it’s obvious that the better hitting teams support their pitchers, whereas pitchers on weaker-hitting teams are in danger of losing if they yield three or more runs.

--With the notable exception of Pedro Guerrero, the Dodgers don’t have much offense. If they were a football team, they’d be relying on field goals.

But that’s a league trend. National League teams are hitting only .243, compared to the American League’s .258. The .243 league average is a noticeable drop-off from recent years: .255 in 1984 and ‘83; .258 in 1982; .259 in 1980 and .260 in 1979.

Don Drysdale, the Hall of Fame former Dodger pitcher, just smiles knowingly when offense, or, rather the lack of it, is discussed.

It was a way of life for Drysdale and Sandy Koufax when they pitched for the Dodgers in the ‘60s.

“A walk to Maury Wills, a stolen base, a ground ball to the right side and a sacrifice fly was a helluva rally for us,” Drysdale recalled. “We just didn’t score a lot of runs in those years.

“My philosophy that I carried throughout my career was to take it pitch by pitch, hitter by hitter and inning and by inning. You always play like it’s a man on third in a 1-0 ball game in the bottom of the ninth inning.

“When you trained your mind to do that by the time you looked up you’re in the sixth or seventh inning and you’ve got a 2-0 or a 2-1 lead. I’ve always maintained that if you give a team three runs, you had a good chance of getting beat. So if I gave them one run, I’d vow that I couldn’t give them two. If I gave them two, then I just couldn’t give them three or I’d wind up second best.”

Drysdale, now a broadcaster for the Chicago White Sox, was so thoroughly indoctrinated with his don’t-give-them-anything philosophy that in 1968 he went 58 innings without allowing a run--a major league record.

“That attitude worked for me,” he said. “Now sometimes you got the bleep kicked out of you. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t come back with the same attitude the next day.

“I think what we did in those years was to solidify the phrase in baseball that you can win on pitching, speed and defense. We didn’t beat ourself. Pitching can become your offense and defense.”

Drysdale tells the story of how he lost a 1-0 game in Philadelphia and then left the team to fulfill a speaking engagement in Washington, D.C.

“Koufax pitched the next night, and someone told me that he had pitched a no-hitter. I responded by saying, ‘Did he win?’ Everybody looked at me kind of funny, but it wasn’t a far-out question. I just told them that you haven’t traveled with us lately.”

Drysdale said that the Dodgers prospered in his era because the team had a “helluva bullpen” to back up the famous starting pitchers.

He was also involved in low-scoring games, for he and Koufax would be matched against pitchers such as Bob Gibson or Juan Marichal.

The low National League batting figure of .243 could be attributed in part to the absence of the designated hitter, who is alive and well in the American League.

But Drysdale has another theory:

“Young pitchers today are learning their trade a little bit quicker than the young hitters. Also, if a hitter hasn’t seen a pitcher the first time around, the advantage goes to the pitcher.”

Although today’s pitchers are obviously skilled, Drysdale says the overall product of major league baseball is not what it used to be.

“It’s not the fault of the kids. It’s just the structure of the game today,” he said. “Once you had 16 clubs and now you have 26. That’s 10 more clubs and 250 more players than you had 20 years ago.

“I see kids in the major leagues today that would have been playing triple-A ball in other years. The product has been diluted through expansion. If you cut back to 16 teams again, you’d see some damn good competition and the caliber of major league baseball would rise tremendously.”

You’d surmise that Drysdale, as a former pitcher, would be sympathetic when today’s pitchers complain that their hitters don’t support them.

Wrong.

“There is nothing in the rule book that says you can’t shut someone out, 1-0,” said Drysdale, closing the book on the subject.