PLANNING TO STAY : Orioles’ Boddicker Once Talked Only of Taking Off His Uniform and Returning to Iowa to Either Feed Livestock or Coach Baseball

On those days when the fire in his elbow equals the one in his belly, Mike Boddicker sometimes thinks of his mother.

She has suffered from arthritis for 30 of her 70 years and been in a wheelchair for the last 15. Her only regular medication has been a handful or so of Bufferin each day, and she brushes off suggestions that she try any new wonder drug.

“She raised three boys and a girl by herself,” Boddicker said. “I remember her hanging a bucket on the side of her walker so she could get around in the kitchen to make pies at Thanksgiving. I think about her, and my aches and pains don’t seem like much. She can’t even open her hands anymore, so I don’t think I’m going to complain about a little twitch in my knee or my back.”

And on those days when he thinks his life isn’t so great, when he’s sick of airports and hotels and missing his family, he tries to remember his brothers back home in Norway, Iowa. One drives a bread truck; the other is a school teacher. He recently loaned a sister money to start a business making and selling ceramic dolls.

“My brothers make about $20,000 a year and they work their butts off,” he said. “It’s a struggle, but they’ve actually got it pretty well because they’re working. The bank hasn’t foreclosed, and what land they have is still theirs. I think about them, and I realize I’ve got it easy. My life is a snap.”

This is no fantasy life. Boddicker returns to Iowa each winter and shovels grain, tends cattle and watches high school basketball. He’s a product of that hard-scrabble land and, although he makes $850,000 a season and travels on chartered jets, he said, “You can get things out of perspective when you start thinking our life is normal.”

He drives an AMC Eagle, lives on a strict budget and says things like, “You won’t see this guy in bankruptcy court.” He’s a Democrat in a Republican clubhouse. To him, the Iowa caucuses were more than pancake-house vignettes on C-Span.

In this, the spring before his sixth major league season, at a time when he’d always said his baseball career would be just about over, Mike Boddicker, 31, has mellowed.

Once the toughest of interviews, he now talks more openly about his career and his life, about his family and about the frustration that has gone from playing for the best team in baseball to one of the worst.

He appears comfortable with himself. Once he talked only of taking the uniform off for the last time and getting back to Iowa to feed livestock or coach high school baseball. Now, like the rock ‘n’ roller who can’t really ever walk away, Boddicker intends to stay.

“In the end, I’ll probably be like everyone else,” he said. “I’ll be around until they cut the uniform off me. I complain and get down sometimes, but when it comes down to it, I still like going out there and trying to get the other guy out. There’s no feeling in the world like that, and it may be tough for people to understand.”

That may be especially true of Boddicker, who got to the big leagues for good only after being sent back to Class 3-A Rochester four times, after Manager Earl Weaver told him, “You can’t win in the big leagues with that stuff you throw.”

Boddicker said: “I looked around and saw Scott McGregor winning. He didn’t throw any harder than me. I saw Steve Stone winning, and he didn’t throw any harder than me. I knew there must be something else.”

For him, it was an old friend, a pitch that he learned at the University of Iowa that was half forkball and half change-up and would eventually twist big league hitters like a pretzel. Boddicker hadn’t thrown the “fosh” pitch much since college, but in 1981 he went back to Rochester and began to throw it every time out.

“It was tough,” he said. “I’m supposed to be an eyelash from the majors and instead I’m back in Rochester getting lit up. But Earl told me I wasn’t coming up until I found something else.”

His career turned around late in 1982 when he went 8-1 in his last 12 Rochester starts, then came to the majors and pitched well in some important games. Even then, there was no room for him. He began the 1983 season at Rochester and wasn’t recalled until May, when Jim Palmer went on the disabled list.

He hasn’t been back to the minors. He was the Orioles’ best pitcher in 1983 (16-8), their best in the playoffs and World Series and has been the staff ace ever since, going 72-60 in five seasons.

He was 10-12 last season, but five times left a game with a lead, only to watch from the dugout as the bullpen lost it. He has been good enough to prove that pitching is still the key to almost everything in baseball. At a time when the Orioles have stunk, they’ve gone 35-31 the last two years with him on the mound and 105-153 when anyone else pitches.

The only knock against him is that he has pitched too often with injuries, especially late in the season. He hasn’t won a game after Sept. 1 since 1984 and, during the last three years, is 26-18 before the all-star break and 10-23 after.

“I know the injuries haven’t helped,” he said. “But I’m going to keep taking the ball. I’m not going to complain about ‘em, just like I’m not going to complain about the bullpen. If I keep us in the game until the seventh or eighth, I’ve done my job.”

He has tried preventive maintenance this winter, doing hundreds of exercises for his knee and back and says, “I feel better now than I have for several years. I’m ready to go.”

His toughness has become legendary. The Orioles remember him throwing a one-hitter in Toronto on a 1985 night when muscle spasms in his back were so severe that trainers had to knead the knots out of his back between innings.

Despite a bad knee and a bad back and a bad elbow and a sore finger, Boddicker has been on the disabled list once in five seasons. He has made 34, 32, 33 and 33 starts in his four full seasons and never pitched fewer than 203 innings.

“I’ve always thought that if I can go out and pitch, I should go,” he said. “When I came up there, the philosophy was that you should be able to get by. Even if you leave the bullpen with only one pitch, you ought to be able to move it around and change speeds enough to get by. That was nothing special. (Mike Flanagan, Palmer and McGregor) have all done it, too.”

He’s one of the last links to another era of the Baltimore Orioles, an era of cockiness and confidence and comedy. Boddicker remembers getting trounced in Chicago one night and, when he walked off the field, three pitchers were sitting in the dugout laughing at him.

“They had tears rolling down their face,” he said. “They acted like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Then before I went inside, Palmer waved me over and said, ‘Sit down.’ He told me, ‘You made the right pitches in the wrong situation.’ He then went over each hitter and told me what I’d done wrong. The point was that I had to make mistakes on my own once, but they kept me from making them again. All I had to do was listen.”

That was a time when the Orioles began the season guaranteed 90 or so victories and of being in contention into September. Their attitude in those days was “to stay close,” McGregor said.

They were so efficient and so confident that someone nicknamed their staff The Graduate School of Pitching. And they could laugh at defeats because defeat was a stranger.

“We’d sit in the dugout and laugh at hitters,” Boddicker said. “I remember (Flanagan) doing play-by-play in the dugout one day. Chet Lemon was at the plate and Flanny would say, ‘He swings and misses at a change-up.’ Then he’d go through this whole thing about how Chet was thinking about the change-up and would miss a fastball. Now, he’s thinking he’ll come back with another fastball, and he’d get a change-up. When Chet walked back to the dugout, you could see the look of confusion on his face. It was funny to sit there, but we were also learning a lot about pitching.”

Boddicker remembers another game, a 1985 start in Anaheim when the Angels pounded him for four homers. When he got on the bus after the game, Flanagan yelled, “Hey, Bod, that was some nice pitching.”

The bus driver in Anaheim normally serenades the Orioles to his rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” but that day, Flanagan asked, “Bus Driver, could you sing one for Bod? Do you know ‘Take Me Out of the Ballgame?’ ”

In the spring of 1988, things have changed. Palmer, Flanagan and Stone are gone, and McGregor is fighting for his professional life. Boddicker is surrounded mostly by kids, and he finds himself telling them the same things Palmer once told him: watch the games, change speeds, throw strikes, etc.

He has appeared frustrated because this generation of Orioles doesn’t always listen as well as the previous generation.

“And what’s so frustrating,” he said, “is that I haven’t always been able to go out and do the things I was telling them to do. That has bothered me a lot. It’s the same when you’re out there. You can tell a hitter is leaning one way, that he’s absolutely set up for a particular pitch. And you can’t put it there. I really think I’m going to put a lot of the pain behind me this year. I’ve worked hard and I feel good.”