This May Be Rick Dempsey’s Last Stand : Dodgers: Backup catcher, who just turned 41, begins important series in Cincinnati with his future in doubt. He says he will not retire.

It is two hours before another game in another title race in the fourth decade of Rick Dempsey’s baseball career. He is talking about Philadelphia’s Lenny Dykstra.

“I have a lot of respect for him as a player,” Dempsey says. “But he’s an idiot as a person.”

He brushes a few strands of hair from his tanned, deeply lined face and shrugs. His fight with Dykstra at home plate on Aug. 20, where the middle-aged Dodger catcher flattened the young batting star with a left hook, did not even make his scrapbook.

You want to talk fights? Rick Dempsey will tell you about a fight.

“It was New Year’s Day, three years ago,” he says. “I’m in Phoenix when three local college football players follow my wife and me back to our hotel. They had been making crude looks at my wife, and when they knocked on my door, I knew it was them. I open the door and one of the guys says something crude and that was it. I snapped.

“I hit one guy in the back of the neck with my World Series ring. Felt like whipped cream. Then I picked up the other guy and carried him to the railing, and damn near threw him off this second-story balcony when my wife stopped me. I put him down, put my wife back into the room, then went back outside after them.”

Dempsey said that two of the men were dragging away their injured buddy, so he went back inside. Only then, he said, did he feel the pain in his left cheek.

“Turns out, one of them had hit me so hard, broke five bones in my face,” Dempsey says, wincing. “Oh well. When I’m under pressure, I forget about everything and just react and, somehow, I do what I have to do.”

Under pressure is where Dempsey has been these last two weeks as he has been thrust into an important role on a team struggling to stay in contention. At the same time, he is struggling to persuade officials that he should remain on this team next year.

On Thursday, he turned 41.

“But this is when it gets fun,” he said, convincingly. “Real fun.”

In the Dodgers’ series at National League West-leading Cincinnati beginning today, the right-handed hitting Dempsey will probably start at least once, because the Reds are using three left-handed pitchers.

The Dodgers hope his performance matches last weekend’s against the Reds at Dodger Stadium. With two left-handers pitching, he started twice.

In Saturday’s 8-4 loss to the Reds, he had a single, two walks, two runs scored and a tackle of angry teammate Kal Daniels that kept Daniels from attacking umpire Gary Darling and probably being suspended for the season.

On Sunday, he hit a two-strike pitch into center field, driving in the tying run in the fifth inning en route to a 6-4 Dodger victory. The sound of Red pitcher Danny Jackson pounding his fist into his glove could be heard all the way to Dempsey’s childhood home of Encino.

With a batting average of .308 in three World Series, Dempsey has been providing pressure hits for years. Still, he causes opponents to kick themselves and observers to shake their heads.

“In baseball, there is a chronological age and a physiological age, and Rick has beaten that physiological age,” said Fred Claire, Dodger vice president, earlier this week. “He does not play like he is 40. He plays like the guy he is--one who works hard every day to keep himself in shape and ready.

“The relationship between Rick and the Dodgers has been everything anybody could have hoped for.”

If that last sentence sounds past tense, well, that’s what has Dempsey worried. With a contract that expires in October, two things tell him that not only is he fighting for this season, but next season as well.

First, there is another backup catcher, Carlos Hernandez, who will join the team this weekend from triple-A Albuquerque, where he batted .315 in 52 games.

Second, there is no clear vote of confidence from Claire. At this time last season, he said he expected to re-sign Dempsey. This year, he is saying no such thing.

“No one can predict what will happen,” Claire said. “Rick’s future should be in baseball, but I know he wants to keep playing and . . . we’ll just have to see.”

Dempsey, who has negotiated his own contracts since Claire gave him double his asking price when he joined the team in 1988, can predict one thing.

“I’m not going to retire,” he said. “As long as I can still play, I’m playing. I don’t know what they are thinking, and I won’t find out until after the season.”

The numbers prove he is still a capable backup. He has thrown out 35% of potential base stealers this season and batted .245 as a starter. And in these last several weeks, beginning with his fight with Dykstra, Dempsey has proven he can still get excited about a close race.

“That fight developed so fast--heck, if I had more time, I could have thrown a few more lefts and rights,” Dempsey said of the incident that cost him $1,000 and resulted in a one-day suspension. “I guess Dykstra just brought out my intensity all at once. He is up there swinging the bat, at the same time calling me a ‘brown-nosing . . . catcher,’ then he drops the bat and I have no choice.

“When I play, I’m not kidding around. Everything matters.”

It is this sort of intensity that has made him so valuable to the Dodgers in this stretch drive, as it made him the most valuable player of the 1983 World Series, when he was with the Baltimore Orioles.

He remembers his RBI double in Game 2 of that Series against Philadelphia--it led the Orioles to the first of four consecutive victories--as clearly as he remembers his hit last week against Jackson.

“I remember standing on second base after that double, feeling like a 1,000-pound weight had been lifted off my shoulders because I had finally proven I could get a big hit in a big game,” Dempsey said of 1983. “Ever since then, those have been my favorite games. Not like I plan it or anything. In those games, something in me just takes over.”