Martinez Shuts Out Braves, 5-0 : Right-Hander Strikes Out 12 in Five-Hit Victory

Ramon Martinez, who turned 21 a few days before the start of this season, has spent most of the year paying for that. In his first 12 big league starts against older foes, he had sometimes been outsmarted and overmatched.

Then the Atlanta Braves showed up Friday night, presenting him with a starting lineup that included three rookies and five players who were just recalled in September.

Martinez took the mound with a tiny smile. At last, he was facing somebody on even terms.

Martinez proved that such a match is no contest as he struck out a career-high 12 batters en route to a five-hit, 5-0 victory.

“Rookie or no rookie,” Martinez said, “they still have a bat in their hands.”

And even though this was the first National League game this season between teams that have been mathematically eliminated, Martinez was backed by 37,405 fans and a pennant-race Dodger effort.

Eddie Murray hit his 19th homer, Lenny Harris drove in three runs with a single and his first Dodger homer, and Mike Marshall made two running catches in right field.

Martinez took care of the rest.

In tying Tim Belcher for the Dodger season high in single-game strikeouts, he had a no-hitter until Andres Thomas’ bloop single with two out in the fifth. Overall, he allowed just eight balls to leave the infield.

Of his 134 pitches, 51 were balls, but there was a difference between Friday’s wildness and the sort that had plagued him in his last 11 starts.

“When he got behind the hitters, he wouldn’t give in,” Dodger second baseman Willie Randolph said.

Like in the eighth inning, after he allowed a lead-off single to John Mizerock, threw a wild pitch, then walked Mark Lemke. With two out, he got Tommy Gregg to hit a fly ball into the right-field gap that a racing Marshall caught over his shoulder at the warning track.

“He was the first to greet me in the dugout after the catch,” Marshall said. “You knew a shutout was on his mind.”

Martinez nearly lost it again in the ninth, when with two out he walked Jeff Blauser and allowed another single to Thomas. But he retired Mizerock on a grounder to first baseman Murray to end the game, improving his record to 5-3 while dropping his earned-run average to 3.23.

Martinez has done this to the Braves before, throwing a six-hit shutout against Atlanta in his major league debut June 6. But entering Friday he had won just three of his 11 starts since, allowing 10 home runs and surviving into the eighth inning once.

“I thought he looked a lot better in that first game than he did tonight,” Brave Manager Russ Nixon said. “You have to look at who he was throwing against.”

The Dodgers preferred not to look at anything but the success of Martinez’s curveball, which he has learned from pitching coach Ron Perranoski with help from Manager Tom Lasorda.

“I just told Perranoski I was very disappointed that a young man who throws the ball as hard as he can does not have a good curveball,” Lasorda said.

“When this happens, either the guy has a stiff wrist and can’t throw a curve, or he just doesn’t know how to throw a curve. In Ramon’s case, he just didn’t know how.”

Said Perranoski: “Throwing that pitch like he threw it tonight, he can become a great one.”

Brave starter Tommy Greene, a highly regarded first-round selection in the June 1985 draft, is also supposed to be a great one. But he allowed Cincinnati four runs in five innings in his major league debut Sunday, and then fell apart Friday night after three innings.

Murray who lately has taken several pitchers apart, led off the fourth with a single to right, then stole second. One out later, Harris made that steal count with a grounder up the middle to score him with the game’s first run.

Two innings later, Randolph started the sixth with a single past third base and up came Murray again. Two pitches later, he homered over the 385-foot sign in fight field and the Dodgers led, 3-0.

In Murray’s last nine games, he has four homers and 11 RBIs. Overall he has 19 homers and 85 RBIs. At this pace, with 14 games left, he has a chance to become the first Dodger to reach 100 RBIs in six years, since Pedro Guerrero had 103 in 1983.

Marshall followed the homer with a groundout, but Jeff Hamilton then singled. Greene’s next pitch was his last, as Harris dumped the ball just over the right-field wall for his third homer.

Dodger Notes

Tim Belcher makes the first of his final three starts tonight with one major goal in mind, and it has nothing to do with his major league-leading six shutouts or his 175 strikeouts, which rank second in the National League. He is shooting to end the season with 225 innings pitched, 22 innings more than his current total of 203.

“I’ve always thought that was a real important statistic, because that means you’ve done well enough to be in games a long time,” he said, noting that he can reach his goal with a minimum of two seven-inning outings and one eight-inning job. “Once you get the innings pitched, those strikeouts and everything will come.” Belcher’s innings total is impressive considering he spent a couple of weeks in the bullpen. He is averaging 6 2/3 innings per start.

Kal Daniels took batting practice with the active players Friday, but it appears unlikely that he will return from his Aug. 11 knee surgery until next spring. “I can hit as well as anybody out here, but hitting is not the problem,” Daniels said, noting that he is still not running 100%. “And if I’m not 100%, there’s no use going out there and hurting myself again,” he said.

Daniels admitted that he attempted to come back too soon from his mid-May knee surgery while with Cincinnati. “It was still hurt, but I didn’t think about it because I didn’t want to miss too much of the season,” he said. “Then after my first game back, we played 14 straight games on turf. That was what hurt me.” This time of the season, Daniels can be forgiven if his thoughts wander to football. Daniels said that coming out of high school in Warner Robins, Ga., he turned down a football scholarship to the University of Georgia, where he would have been the quarterback on a team featuring Herschel Walker.

John Wetteland looked weary the day after his season-worst performance against Houston, in which he allowed six runs in 1 2/3 innings. “I’m getting bombarded with so much (advice) from so many people,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of trying all these different thing. I’ve got to back to what I do best. If you can throw 90-plus m.p.h. at the knees, you don’t need to do a whole lot of pitching.” . . . Former Dodger Wes Parker was one of the Sports- Channel announcers Friday in an informal audition to replace Don Sutton, who is going to TBS next season.