PENNED IN : It Will Be a Relief to Belcher When the Dodgers Finally Give Him a Start

The second week of Dodger Tim Belcher’s bullpen incarceration is under way and there has been no muttering, cup clanging or food throwing. Belcher has been a model prisoner. And not a bad relief pitcher, either.

But Belcher, a hard-throwing rookie right-hander, wants to make it clear that, once he has done his time in the bullpen, he wants to show the Dodgers that they made the right choice in making him their fifth starting pitcher.

Thanks to a quirk of scheduling, the Dodgers have had two days off in the first week of the season, and Manager Tom Lasorda chose to proceed with a 4-man rotation. So Belcher has patiently remained in the bullpen, making two impressive relief appearances while awaiting his parole date back into the rotation.

Belcher tentatively is scheduled to start next Monday against the San Diego Padres at Dodger Stadium. But Ron Perranoski, the Dodgers’ pitching coach, said he may give Belcher time off for good behavior and slip him into the rotation earlier, although probably not in the 3-game series against the Padres starting tonight at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

“I don’t mind waiting,” Belcher said. “I guess it only made sense, the way the schedule was. They explained it to me. But I am kind of anxious to start.”

Waiting may be as important to Belcher as his split-finger fastball and changeup. Although a rookie from a rural town--Sparta, Ohio, population 250--Belcher is 26 and has followed a long and winding path to the major leagues.

Belcher was a first-round draft pick not once, but twice. Before he threw his first professional pitch, he switched organizations. When he finally started his pro career, he was detoured by a shoulder injury. Then, near the end of last season, he had to wait to find out if he was the player to be named when the Dodgers traded Rick Honeycutt to the Oakland Athletics.

Now, there’s this limited engagement in the bullpen, which Belcher might have perceived as another delay had he not had the patience and humor to put it in perspective.

“The soap opera continues,” Belcher said, laughing. “Nah. When you look at it, I don’t think it’s unique or special to me being the fifth starter in the bullpen. A lot of teams have early off-days, so the fifth starters are sitting.”

Even so, Belcher’s career has been far from ordinary.

For years in Sparta, Belcher played shortstop and catcher, although townsfolk tried to persuade him to become a pitcher. He had a strong arm, they said, and it was a waste not to use it. Belcher hit .460 as a senior at Highland High but, after making 16 errors in 17 games at shortstop in American Legion play, his coach, Dick Meyer, ordered him to the pitching mound.

“I didn’t like pitching,” Belcher said. “I liked being a catcher, where the action was. Pitching was boring.”

Belcher earned a scholarship to nearby Mt. Vernon Nazarene College, which he described as being nearly as small as Sparta. It was big enough to attract the scouts.

Several weeks before the June draft in 1983, the Minnesota Twins told Belcher that they planned to select him with the first pick in the first round and they wanted to get a jump on negotiating the contract.

Negotiations went poorly, though. Belcher may have been a small-town boy, but he said he knew the Twins were trying to “get the best talent they could for the least amount of dollars,” which basically was a slogan for the Calvin Griffith regime.

“The negotiations went nowhere and the night before the draft--the biggest day of my life--John Brophy (Twins’ farm director) calls me and just reads me out over the phone . . . and I finally just hung up the phone. They called me back and said they’d draft me anyway.”

Which the Twins did. Belcher said he didn’t hear from any club official for 10 days after the draft. It was understood that he was not going to sign.

In January of 1984, Belcher’s name topped many teams’ lists for the secondary phase of the free-agent draft. He was selected first overall by the New York Yankees, signed a big bonus contract on Feb. 2 and was assigned to a Class-A team in Greensboro, N.C.

But a few days before he reported, he received a call from then-Yankee executive Murray Cook.

“He said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ ” Belcher recalled. “They told me that Oakland had picked me up in the compensation draft. I was upset. They were really upset. They hold this big press conference for me in New York, then a few days later, I’m not even in the organization. They had a lot of explaining to do.”

The explanation? Under the old rules, teams had to circulate lists of the protected players on their rosters by mid-January. Since Belcher hadn’t signed until Feb. 2, he was not protected.

So, when the A’s received a high compensatory draft pick after pitcher Tom Underwood signed with the Baltimore Orioles, they selected Belcher. The Yankees were embarrassed, the A’s ecstatic, Belcher bewildered.

Belcher’s career was progressing nicely--he struck out 111 in 98-plus innings in double A--when he was slowed first by fits of wildness and then a strained right shoulder. One was not a precursor to the other, Belcher said, but both threatened his career with the A’s.

In 1985, with Oakland’s double-A team in Huntsville, Ala., Belcher had an 11-10 record with a 4.69 earned-run average. Most disturbing, though, Belcher walked 99 batters in 149 innings.

In late January of 1986, Belcher’s Puerto Rican team was headed to the Caribbean Series when Belcher finally decided he needed rest before the start of spring training. So, he returned to Sparta.

“I did absolutely nothing for those 10 days,” Belcher said. “It was great.”

It didn’t do great things to his arm, though.

“When I flipped the switch back on for spring training, I just didn’t have it,” he said. “About two weeks into the spring, I felt pain in my shoulder. There was no major blowout, but if I had kept pitching, there might have been.”

The injury was diagnosed as a strain, and Belcher needed almost the entire season to recuperate. One more delay.

By last spring, though, his shoulder pain was history and Belcher was promoted to the A’s triple-A team in Tacoma, Wash., where he walked 133 batters in 163 innings.

“I was never wild,” Belcher said. “I just didn’t always throw strikes. There’s a difference. I lacked concentration and was trying to do too much.”

When the A’s acquired Honeycutt on Aug. 29 for a player to be named, Belcher said he initially had mixed feelings, but that changed.

“When I found out (Sept. 3), I was happy,” Belcher said. “I had built a pretty large wall with Oakland over four years, and each brick represented a walk.”

Strangely, Belcher’s control problems left when he became a Dodger. He posted a 4-2 record with a 2.38 ERA in the final month of a dismal Dodger season. More impressive, he walked only 7 batters in 34 innings.

Belcher credits no change in his pitching other than simply not worrying about walks and the inherent pressure of pitching in the major leagues.

“I had built up in my mind this picture that you had to be overpowering to pitch in the big leagues. Then I got here and found you don’t have to be Cy Young. You pitch the same way you always do.”

Belcher has taken that same attitude into his temporary relief assignment. He pitched two scoreless innings in relief of Fernando Valenzuela in the season opener, then earned his first major league save by pitching four scoreless innnings in relief of Tim Leary last Friday night.

As a result, Belcher is viewing the bullpen as something of a vacation cottage.

“It’s the old cliche: Nothing is as hard as it seems.”