The Simple Life of Tim Belcher : Dodgers: When the season is over, it’s back to the farm. Baseball is what complicates things.

Tim Belcher’s problem was that he always figured life to be like one of his fastballs. Simple. Fair. If you swung and missed, you knew why.

The Dodger pitcher grew up in Sparta, a central Ohio farm town of 250 people and one four-way stop sign. His father was raised in the house next door. His grandparents ran Belcher’s General Store next to that four-way stop.

After school Belcher would tend to the horses in the barn behind his house. During summers he would bale hay for Harry Martin, who paid $3.50 an hour and, to this day, the best lunch Belcher has ever eaten.

He went to college 12 miles from Sparta, at Mount Vernon Nazarene, and continued to live in his parents’ house. One of his extracurricular activities was coaching the seventh-grade basketball team.

When his 90-plus m.p.h. fastball placed him on the world-touring United States national team at age 21, it was the first time he had been on an airplane. When he arrived in Los Angeles four years later, it was one of the first times he had been in a traffic jam.

“There’s nothing real complicated here,” Belcher says, shrugging. “I’m pretty much straight forward. You work hard, you get paid. You do your best, you get rewarded. You say something one way, you don’t turn around and say something else.”

Which is where his problems have always begun, because professional baseball isn’t always just about fastballs. It is about curves, and trick pitches and a million other things waiting to blindside you. Things you won’t find on the farm. With so much illusion, sometimes you work hard and do your best and it doesn’t mean a darn thing.

All of which Belcher has never quite understood.

And so when someone explains that Belcher begins this season on the verge of becoming the National League’s best pitcher and Dodgers’ player of the ‘90s . . . understand this is only if he doesn’t kill himself or his teammates first.

At double-A Huntsville, Ala., Belcher would get so angry after losses, he was called “Hurricane” Belcher. Once he locked himself in the clubhouse for five minutes while, to the horror of teammates listening outside, he took out his frustrations with an aluminum bat and a 55-gallon trash can.

By last year, although he was older and had a couple of major league rookie awards in his locker, things had not changed.

When he threw well and umpires appeared to hurt him with questionable calls, he argued. Who can forget how he challenged umpire Ed Montague to a fight in the Dodger dugout in the early morning of June 28 after being tagged with an extra-inning loss? Belcher says the incident was caused by his frustration over being sent to the bullpen, and admits that Montague is one of the game’s best umpires.

When he threw well and teammates wouldn’t hit--which was just about every start--the same thing happened. Who can forget his words to the Dodger offense when he walked through the dugout in the middle of an eventual 2-0 loss in Philadelphia May 13?

“Let’s score some . . . runs,” he shouted, a publicized phrase that irked the team’s already frustrated hitters. Belcher says that he is always exhorting his teammates to score, only, “This time, it came out a little too sarcastic.”

When going poorly, Belcher curses at himself on the mound. He stomps around the clubhouse between innings. Win or lose, he gets so intense he sweats through as many as four shirts a game.

Dodger officials suspended their concern when he finished last season with seven consecutive victories and an earned-run average of 1.25 during that time, establishing himself as the league’s hottest pitcher entering the 1990 season. They particularly loved his final home game Sept. 27 against the San Francisco Giants, who could have cinched the West Division with a victory. He held them to four hits with 11 strikeouts in winning, 1-0, and all with a fractured finger.

At 28 and with one of the best arms in the league, they know that beginning with his first start Tuesday at San Diego, he could be this team’s most important player. But the Dodgers wonder, as does Belcher.

Has the hurricane passed?

“He has a great disposition for a pitcher. He’s so tough out there . . . He just has to learn to put hitters behind him,” catcher Rick Dempsey said. “He has to forget about what happened and go to the next guy, to not worry about things you can’t control.

“But as much as we talk about it, I think he’s learning it.”

Earlier this spring, Belcher smiled when asked about it.

“Tommy (Lasorda, Dodger manager) keeps telling me, ‘Relax, don’t be so hard on yourself,’ ” he said. “And I’ll admit, maybe I’ve been a little over-dramatic. Maybe I have not tempered my emotions enough. And I am working on that.

“But there is a real danger in complacency, and I’m never going to give in to that. I hear all these people saying, ‘Well, we’ll just get ‘em tomorrow.’ I say, the hell with that. You don’t get ‘em tomorrow. You get ‘em today. “

Or in the case of Belcher’s contract, get ‘em next year. He made news this winter when he would not agree to a Dodger contract offer of $450,000 and for a second consecutive year his contract was unilaterally renewed.

“I just hope they’ve started getting their arbitration case together,” Belcher said of the Dodgers at the time, referring to his eligibility for salary arbitration next winter.

If it sounds as though Belcher might be barely softening, one of his best friends from back home says that the softening is real. According to Mike Robinson, Belcher’s cousin and boyhood friend, if you don’t think he’s changing, just look at his basement.

“This winter he decided to fix up his basement, and so like everything he does, he was real intense about it. You’d call him at 8:30 in the morning and he’d be down there putting up drywall,” Robinson said in a phone conversation from Cardington, Ohio, which is seven miles from Belcher’s Mount Gilead home, which is 14 miles from Sparta.

“But then he went on vacation, and had some things come up with those players negotiations, and all of a sudden he just laid ‘er down. Just stopped working on the basement. You go down there now and it’s half finished, just the way he left her.”

Robinson laughed. “I never thought I would see him leave something undone,” he said. “But he’s learning to not worry about things he can’t control. I really sense that change. He’s like, calmer.”

They know all about Belcher’s intensity back home. He didn’t just play little league baseball, he kept a day-by-day account of his statistics. He had one of the best arms on the team, but he couldn’t pitch because he couldn’t stand to give up a hit.

Later, he didn’t just play basketball for Highland High, he lived it. He would become so upset with his team’s mistakes that he would continually say or do something to get thrown out of basketball practice. Once the games began, he was the king of technical fouls, particularly on balls thrown extra hard to officials.

“He was his own worst enemy growing up,” said Jim Schoch, his high school basketball coach. “He could have played varsity ball as a sophomore, but we held him back because of maturity. He had to learn to control his emotions.”

His chief emotion, then as now, was a basic one. It was what guided him to make sure the horses’ stalls were clean and the general store was stocked and swept before going to play any sports.

“I believe in the value of hard work and responsibility,” Belcher said. “You work hard, you earn something.”

And if somebody frowned upon his hard work?

When he was a senior in high school, too slow to play basketball but maybe not too slow to be a baseball shortstop, he carefully typed and mailed letters of introduction to the 15 or 16 biggest college baseball programs in Ohio.

“I told them who I was, that I was interested in playing ball, and I invited them to come see me,” said Belcher, his resonant voice reverting to the soft innocence of back then. “And of course, I got nothing but form letters back.”

After agreeing to play at Mount Vernon Nazarene, he was converted to a pitcher for his summer American Legion team, and with his strong arm he led it to a state title. Following the championship game at Ohio University, the school’s baseball coach approached Belcher and said he that he had received Belcher’s letter months earlier and now was interested in signing him.

Belcher, who would have loved to play for the biggest school, let his values dictate his response.

“I told the guy, ‘It’s August, man. You had your chance,’ ” Belcher said.

And so for never more than a $500 scholarship a year, he attended the tiny Christian school, where the Minnesota Twins made him the nation’s No. 1 draft choice after his junior year. He did not sign, and by now maybe you can guess why.

The then-cheap Twins offered him an $85,000 bonus, which was less than No. 1 picks had received in the previous four years. Then they told Belcher he had to take it.

“The night before the draft, their farm director George Brophy was on the phone yelling at me, ‘We are going to draft you and, yes, you will sign, you little bleep. You will sign!’ ” Belcher recalled. “I guess they thought I was a scared little country boy who didn’t have a choice. Well, I had the choice to do what was right.”

And so in a rare, highly publicized decision, Belcher stayed in school. He was drafted the following January by the New York Yankees, then soon claimed by the Oakland A’s as compensation for a lost free agent. After four wild years in the A’s farm system--including 133 walks for triple-A Tacoma in 1987--he was traded to the Dodgers for pitcher Rick Honeycutt late in the 1987 season.

He has since improved his control--he walked 80 against 200 strikeouts last season--while becoming one of the league’s best pitchers. Despite being 15-12 last year, he led the major leagues with eight shutouts while tying San Diego’s Bruce Hurst for the National League lead in complete games with 10.

Other than the statistics, though, not much about him has changed.

He owns an $85,000 house directly on Rt. 95. Last year he bought an old pickup truck.

He loves the small-town life and still laughs about how you can probably find the handprints of he and his wife Theresa in the concrete around her childhood house outside Sparta. They were both around five years old at the time, and his father helped build it.

One of the first things he did upon returning to Ohio last winter was climb in that pickup truck and drive to a farm belonging to his wife’s uncle.

“It was harvest time. They were taking off corn and beans. I figured I would help,” Belcher said with a shrug.

“I think he is uncomfortable with the success and money he’s gotten. I think he almost feels bad about it, so I think he makes sure he doesn’t show it,” Robinson said.

When it was time to involve himself in the baseball union’s contract negotiations, as the Dodgers player representative Belcher was constantly making the 45-minute drive to Columbus and flying to New York. But not because he wanted to be on television.

“My father was in a carpenter’s union, my uncle is a teamster. We’re a big union family, so it only makes sense for me,” Belcher said. “My upbringing has revolved around the working man.”

And so beginning Tuesday in San Diego, the working man tries to adjust to not-so-middle-class life in the major leagues.

“My temper will be better,” he promised. “Really, I won’t let so much bother me. I really think I can overlook some things now.”

But when he was asked if his temper was a blessing or a curse, he laughed again.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably a little of both.”