Lasorda’s Message: Believe : Baseball: Dodgers have responded to challenge laid down by manager in June clubhouse meeting held when they were 11 games out.

It is June 4. The Dodgers have lost three of four games to the Cincinnati Reds at Dodger Stadium and are 11 games out of first place.

Faces are drawn. Voices are low, attitudes sullen. It takes players 10 minutes to pull on their socks.

Tom Lasorda decides it is time for a chat.

Before a game with the Atlanta Braves, he gathers his millionaires into their clubhouse. He waddles in on bad knee and bowed legs and orders the doors closed.

As his players stare at him from their blue directors’ chairs, he knows some won’t listen. He knows that no matter what he says, some of them are not going to charge outside and grab tonight’s game around the neck. He knows these are modern-day players.

But he is an old-fashioned manager. And he won’t change certain parts of his game.

“I’ll tell you one thing right now!” he shouts. “We may be down to the Reds, but I ain’t quitting! I’m not stopping believing that we can catch them. They are going to go into a slump, and when they do, we are going to be right there! We can catch them! We can!

“I believe this! As sure as I believe I’m breathing, I believe this! And if any of you . . . doesn’t believe this, then get out of here! If any of you . . . wants to quit on this team, you get into my office and we’ll take care you!”

He catches his breath, wipes his mouth and walks to his office. He closes the door and waits.

No knocks. No players. That night, Ramon Martinez strikes out 18 Braves and the Dodgers win, 6-0.

It is the first of 42 victories in the next 76 games. The Dodgers cut the 11-game lead to 6 1/2.

In the final days of August, his unlikely team in a title race, Lasorda is asked whether back in June he really believed the Dodgers could catch the Reds. Did he really mean that part of the speech in which he invited unhappy players to meet him in his office?

He smiles, glances around his office, lowers his voice.

“If I didn’t believe it, do you think I would ever admit it?” he says.

Lasorda lost his best starting pitcher and his best relief pitcher in April. He lost his third baseman in May. His center fielder wasn’t ready to play until June. His No. 2 relief pitcher wasn’t ready to pitch until July.

His left fielder began the season with bad knees and a bad rap about hitting left-handed pitching. His right fielder, who he hoped would be one of the team leaders, started in a slump.

With a month left in the season and his front office compiling playoff programs, the best way to understand how he has treated the season’s problems is to watch how he treats flies that congregate in his office.

“Got one!” he shouted the other day, smashing a fly with his hand against a stack of memos. “You see, what you’ve got to understand about flies is that even though they lean one way, they are getting ready to fly the other way. You’ve got to be ready for that.”

Lasorda’s nightmare began April 27, when Orel Hershiser was lost for the season because of shoulder surgery.

“It devastated me,” Lasorda said recently, something he could not admit at the time. “I was at a luncheon when I received a message to call (Dodger vice president) Fred Claire, and I said, ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ ”

He called a clubhouse meeting and said it was one of the hardest speeches he has ever given.

“I told them, we could win with or without Orel Hershiser,” Lasorda said. “I never thought I would be saying that. But I didn’t know what else to say.

“I’ve got to come in here with a happy face. Especially then. I have to hope that if they think everything is all right with me, it will be all right with them. What else can I do?”

After losing that night to St. Louis, his devastated team won four of the next six games to avoid immediate collapse.

“When things are going bad, no matter how long you have played the game, you want to hear what is going on in the man’s mind,” said Hubie Brooks, speaking generically of bosses. “It was good for Tommy to lay it out there for us, let us know what he was thinking. Hearing that, it kind of took away the edge.”

While the team was fighting off worries about Hershiser, Lasorda was, quietly, just as worried about Jay Howell, his ace reliever who underwent arthroscopic knee surgery April 23.

Lasorda knew he had no qualified stopper. Tim Crews, Don Aase and Ray Searage were setup men. And Jim Gott, who had undergone major elbow surgery in 1989, was not yet ready to pitch.

So he did what every good poker player with a bad hand should do. He cut his losses.

He did not complain when his makeshift bullpen allowed runs or lost games in pressure situations. He didn’t want to kill their confidence, since they would be resuming their former roles when Howell or Gott returned.

He would not release or demote Crews during a stretch in early May when he allowed nine runs in five appearances. He treated Searage the same when he allowed five runs during a similar four-game stretch. And he did not rush Gott or criticize his early struggles.

“I will not fault a guy for trying to pitch out of his role--that’s like blaming a reliever for doing poorly if you make him a starting pitcher,” Lasorda said. “Certain guys are good for certain situations and that’s it. You can’t get rid of a guy just because of that. You have to use him to the best of his ability.”

Today, with everyone back in good shape, the bullpen has gone from abysmal to above average. In last weekend’s series against the New York Mets, relief pitchers allowed one run in 13 innings.

“Every time I would do bad in the beginning, he would never come up to me and say, ‘Jim, you stunk,’ ” Gott said. “He would say something like, ‘That curveball is looking better, but why don’t you try it this way?’ He was always helpful. As it turns out, I was handled perfectly.”

Lasorda’s only bullpen problem involved giving Howell too much work immediately after his surgery, which Lasorda did partly out of desperation and partly because he thought Howell was fully recovered.

Just as Lasorda was juggling his way through the Howell problem, third baseman Jeff Hamilton was put on the disabled list April 21, then underwent shoulder surgery May 4.

Lasorda had no backup third basemen. There were cries for the recall of Dave Hansen from triple A. Others in the organization were hoping for a trade.

Instead, Lasorda called together two reserve infielders who had never held a regular major league job for more than a month and told them the job belonged to them.

Four months later, Lenny Harris and Mike Sharperson have become the cornerstone of Dodger success.

“He called us right in his office, told us I would play against left-handers and Lenny would play against right-handers and that was that,” said Sharperson, batting .321 while Harris is hitting .296. “He wasn’t going to wait and see how we did. He wasn’t going to go to triple A or anything.

“He put confidence in us right from the start, when I’m sure some people were wondering.”

Said Lasorda: “I just told them what I expected of them and they responded. I like to tell players exactly what I expect of them and hope they expect that of themselves.”

During that time, two other players needing fresh starts got them from Lasorda.

Hubie Brooks, the right fielder, had left Montreal as a free agent after having been briefly benched there late last season during a slump. Kal Daniels, the left fielder, had arrived in a trade from Cincinnati after his former manager, Pete Rose, said: “Kal can’t hit left-handed pitching.”

After hitting his game-winning homer on opening day, Brooks slumped badly. But Lasorda would not take him out of the lineup.

“He never said anything to me, but it was a feeling I got, like, this belief he had in me,” Brooks said. “I could just feel it. It made it easier to play.”

Brooks has rebounded and is batting .322 in August with four homers and 14 RBIs in 26 games. Overall, he has 16 homers and 67 RBIs.

“I told Hubie he was going to hit 20 homers with 80 RBIs this year,” Lasorda claimed. “Just ask him.”

Daniels plays almost every day against all sorts of pitching and is batting .285 with 19 homers and 63 RBIs. Only once did Lasorda mention anything about left-handed pitching.

“I called him in when I got him and I told him, ‘I don’t take anybody’s word for anything,’ ” Lasorda said. “I told them he was playing every day no matter what, and that under those circumstances, I knew he could hit left-handed pitching.”

Lasorda made another bold stroke on May 13 in New York. Kirk Gibson was ready to rejoin the lineup and Lasorda wanted to move him to center field without benching one of his veterans. So he suggested that Claire pursue a deal that would open up second base for then-center fielder Juan Samuel.

“I knew that meant we had to trade Willie Randolph, but it had to be done,” said Lasorda of the deal that sent last year’s team MVP to Oakland for Stan Javier.

People criticized the trade, particularly after Lasorda said they were actually trading Randolph for Gibson. But while Randolph has struggled in Oakland, Gibson’s resurgence has sparked the club, Sharperson and Harris have spelled a slumping Samuel at second base on occasion and Javier has become a valuable fourth outfielder.

“It’s all a matter of belief,” Lasorda said. “I believed Gibson could help turn this club around. I had seen it before. Whatever it took to get him in the lineup, I would do. Because I believed.”