Norris Was Well Past Strike 3 : Baseball: He returns to major leagues after 7 years, having overcome his cocaine habit.

A member of the Oakland Athletics again, having gone seven years between major league appearances because of a wrenching battle with substance abuse and an ailing shoulder, Mike Norris peered through the mist of memory and focused on New Year’s Day, 1986.

Norris sat by his locker in the Seattle Kingdome the other day, recalling what he now considers the lowest of his lows: waking up with a woman he met only hours before, knowing he had gone through $300 in cocaine, but being determined to return to the bar where he had begun his New Year’s celebration.

“There I was at 10 in the morning, in the same place, wearing the same clothes, having the same thing to drink, when I finally realized how ridiculous and repulsive I had become,” Norris said.

“My self-esteem was zero. I’d brought embarrassment and humiliation to my mom, my family and myself. I’d been arrested. I’d gone through four drug programs. My career seemed to be over, yet it was weird.

“As low as I was, I knew I was finally ready to do something about it because I’d had enough. I was tired of it. For the first time, I truly didn’t like myself. I mean, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

“I go through $300 in drugs on the last day of ’85 and begin ’86 knowing I’m through with it. That’s why I consider New Year’s Day my new birthday. It was the start of my new life.”

Insistent that he has been clean since that day, Norris is beginning a new career at 35, a comeback that boggles the imagination.

Seven years between appearances? The average major league career lasts about five years.

And for Michael Kelvin Norris, who began his major league career by shutting out the Chicago White Sox in 1975 and who was 25 when he won 22 games with the A’s in 1980, the larger question, for a time, was how long his life would last.

“There are three things you can look forward to with cocaine: hospitalization, incarceration and death,” Norris said. “I’d done two of the three. The only thing left was death. It was the next step. The only way out of the misery, the madness.”

The addict takes it one day at a time.

Today, Norris is with the A’s in Anaheim, staying in a hotel that is a long way from the cheap motels he often woke up in with no recollection of how he arrived. The knock on the door is likely to be room service rather than the Internal Revenue Service having come to collect on back taxes. The $4.3 million he received on a five-year contract signed after the 1980 season is gone. He will be paid the major league minimum of $100,000 in 1990, but that is far better than the unemployment of 1987 and ’88.

Better yet is the emotional charge of climbing a major league mound again, as he did last Wednesday in Oakland to shut out the Minnesota Twins for two innings in his first big league appearance since Aug. 6, 1983, a span of 2,439 days.

There were standing ovations from a crowd of 27,775, and the public address system blared “What Is Hip” by Tower of Power, his theme during what Norris calls his salad days.

“To know I hadn’t been forgotten and to be pitching again in the big leagues was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever experienced,” Norris said. “As high as I was, there was a time I’d have automatically gone out and gotten loaded, but I don’t need it anymore and I don’t think about it anymore.

“It’s gone, over, past. I blame myself for all the years I could have been productive, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. I have to take each day as it comes and build on that.”

Among their 27 players, the A’s are carrying 12 pitchers, and Norris seems likely to stay when rosters are reduced to 25 or 24 players in two weeks.

A’s Manager Tony La Russa usually keeps 11 pitchers, and the right-handed Norris has an advantage in that his screwball is particularly effective against left-handed hitters.

As Gary Gaetti of the Twins noted after Norris pitched those two innings last Wednesday: “The first thing I thought about was screwball. The pitch, not the personality.”

La Russa said Norris probably would have made the club even if rosters had been at normal size, that he has pitched effectively every time since the start of spring training.

“I feel like I can pitch him any time, in any situation,” La Russa said. “He has the experience and the guts to pitch in the ninth if I wanted him to.

“Am I amazed by what he has done? I guess I’m pleasantly impressed. Mike is a quality athlete, and guys like that are capable of amazing things, though not too many could make the comeback he has. He deserves a lot of credit.”

The A’s reopened the door in the spring of 1989, inviting Norris to Arizona and a shot at a minor league contract.

In the previous five seasons, he pitched a total of 69 innings--none in 1984, when he was recovering from injury, and none in 1987 and ‘88, when he suspects he was being blackballed by then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth and had to abort two trips to the Mexican League because of arm and stomach ailments.

In fact, it was almost as if he didn’t play at all in those five years, because he pitched only 13 innings at Modesto of the Class-A California League in 1985 before being disqualified for failing a drug test and 56 innings with the San Jose Bees, a California League team at that time made up of baseball outcasts, in 1986.

Norris, however, said he never lost hope.

“I don’t mean this as a knock at a guy like Tommy John, because he’s a great pitcher,” Norris said. “But I kept seeing him throw his 79-m.p.h. fastball and signing contract after contract. That alone was a motivation for me. I kept telling myself, ‘I can do that. All I need is a chance.’

“I mean, I felt I was as capable as a lot of other pitchers as well.”

General Manager Sandy Alderson said the A’s provided that chance because of their long emotional attachment to Norris and the belief that he had paid enough of a price.

“Why make him continue to pay?” Alderson said. “Put everything aside and he’s a good person. He needed a job and he deserved one.”

Norris spent most of the 1989 season at triple-A Tacoma of the Pacific Coast League, a measure of “character growth,” he said, and “a humbling test of will in my favor.” He was 6-6 with a 3.18 earned-run average and went 3-1 in his last five starts.

“The more innings I pitch, the stronger my arm is getting and the more velocity I have,” Norris said. “I’m at about 84 or 85 (m.p.h.) now. I never threw more than 88 anyway, so I’m not that far off. It’s no secret that the screwball has always been my ‘out’ pitch, and now that I’m seeing a hitter only one time (per game) anyway, I’m going to go with my best pitch.”

Steve Stone of the Baltimore Orioles won the American League’s Cy Young Award in 1980, but no one pitched better than Norris, who worked nine complete games in which he gave up four hits or fewer and was second in the league in victories, ERA, strikeouts, complete games and innings pitched.

That was the year when Billy Martin, then the A’s manager, seemed to overwork his young and talented rotation. Norris pitched 284 innings, almost 140 more than the previous year, but he doesn’t believe it led to his subsequent shoulder problem.

“Billy gave me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Norris said. “He believed in me when others didn’t. I had a tremendous season, and if I had the chance to do it the same way again, I would.

“My problems developed the next year when we were out so long because of the strike. I mean, everyone thought the season was over and I didn’t stay in shape the way I should have, and when we finally came back (after missing 52 days) I tried to do too much too soon. Even then, it didn’t really set in as to how bad my arm was until the following year.”

Norris finished with a 12-9 record in ’81 and attempted to pitch through the pain in ’82 and ‘83, producing a combined record of 11-16 and making his last big league appearance--before Wednesday--in August, 1983.

That November, he had surgery to repair nerve blockage in his shoulder.

“When a doctor tells you that you have only a 30% chance of pitching again after being the best pitcher in the game only two years before, it’s a tremendous blow,” Norris said. “I was told not to pick up a ball for a full year. The problem was, I should have been coming to the park and staying in shape. Instead I stayed home with people I thought were my friends. I mean, ’84 was a nightmare.”

Involved in drugs since 1979, Norris said the injury and surgery took his use to new levels.

He was arrested for possession at an Oakland hotel and again while driving on Interstate 580, the charges being dropped in exchange for his enrollment in rehabilitation programs that didn’t help him cure his problem.

Why did he start using drugs in the first place?

“I’ve beaten myself up looking for a reason and never found it,” said Norris, a San Francisco high school star who carried the weight of great expectations into a major league career with a hometown team, his door always open, his phone always ringing.

“It’s amazing how ignorant I was to think some people were my friends. As soon as my life started to go down the tubes and I couldn’t do anything more for them, they were like rats jumping off a sinking ship. I mean, the phone suddenly stopped ringing, I suddenly found out who my real friends were, but I don’t blame anyone else.

“I think there were several factors, including the superficiality of the game itself. There’s so much idle time that it can easily happen. There was a lot of drug use in baseball then. It’s amazing now to see how the game has cleaned itself up, but it became a social thing to do throughout the league then.

“And the big lure, the big deception with cocaine, was that it was sold as an echelon type drug that wasn’t addictive.”

Norris paused, his face tightening.

“What it is is the closest thing to the Devil on Earth,” he said. “It is the Devil on Earth. It is not only addictive but progressively so. I mean you can stop, thinking that if you start again it will be at the beginning, but it’s really at the same level where you stopped. I don’t know how many times I was told that but didn’t want to believe it. I had to experience it for myself. It was frightening.”

On that morning in 1986, the first morning of the new year, Norris recognized that he would have to come to grips with it by himself, that he would finally have to live alone for a time, isolate himself, rebuild his self-esteem.

Throughout the ordeal and recovery, there were friends who provided support. Among them, Norris said were Dave Stewart, Rickey Henderson, Claudell Washington and Norris’ attorney, John Lence.

He also cited his mother’s unwavering love, the patience of Alderson and former A’s president Roy Eisenhardt and a pivotal meeting in the spring of 1986 with a Bay Area-based flight attendant named Lenise Patrick.

Norris began an impromptu conversation on a flight from Chicago after he had met earlier in the day with Ueberroth in New York, been robbed by a teen-ager who promised to secure Norris a cab amid the snow in Manhattan and forced to take a later flight when he missed his original connection because of his futile pursuit of the thief.

If was as if he and Patrick were destined to meet, and he said:

“For three straight hours we talked about nothing but God and the Bible,” he said. “She was beautiful, intelligent, different than anyone I had ever met.”

They have been together since. Norris credits her with helping him cope with his insecurities and providing an inner peace. His highs now, he said, come through religion and an awareness of spiritual and environmental beauty.

“For five or six years I was laughing on the outside and crying on the inside,” he said. “Now I can look myself in the mirror and say, ‘You’re a decent human being.’ My self-esteem is back. I don’t worry and wonder about how I screwed it up. The Lord has rewarded me and I think I earned it.”

The A’s, of course, are monitoring his progress through random testing--in the laboratory and on the mound.