Mexico to the Majors : Baseball: Pitcher Dave Walsh hopes to use his time in Tijuana as a steppingstone to the Dodgers.

Dave Walsh’s truck rumbles past women dragging laundry through crumbling shacks, past children playing in last night’s garbage.

Far from Dodger Stadium, he pulls into the parking lot of a weathered stone structure where the breeze is chilly and smells faintly of sulfur.

Walsh grabs his Dodger duffel bag, kicks through the gravel, walks up a ramp and spreads his arms. “This is it,” he says, looking at the baseball field below. “This is home.”

This is Tijuana Stadium, where the grass grows so unevenly that the outfield resembles an unshaven face, where the pitching mound is so small and misshapen, it resembles a wart.

This is where Dave Walsh, 30, a recovering alcoholic with nine years in pro baseball, has come to work on his first and probably last chance to be a major league star.

Walsh is a left-handed relief pitcher, which may come as news to Dodger critics who consistently claim the team doesn’t have any left-handed relief pitchers. But Walsh ended last season as its best. Pitching the final two months, he allowed opponents to score in only four of his 20 appearances, going 1-0 with one save and 15 strikeouts in 16 1/3 innings.

Those statistics, plus a curveball and his composed demeanor, will cause the Dodgers to stop at his locker first next spring when searching to fill their most gaping hole. “David Walsh definitely has a shot,” Manager Tom Lasorda has said.

But Walsh’s seemingly never-ending road toward stardom goes through Tijuana Stadium and similar places south of the border, where Walsh is spending this winter refining his skills in the Mexican League.

“I do good down here, I get myself ready. . . . Who knows? Maybe next spring I have a chance,” Walsh says quietly. “Maybe.”

After a career that has yet to include even an invitation to a major league spring training camp, a career that includes three years spent in an alcohol and marijuana-induced blur, Walsh is unwilling to concede anything to himself.

That is why on this winter afternoon, after a 35-minute drive from his San Diego apartment, he is the first player at the park.

“You got to love it,” he says, smiling, as he steps into the tiny stone clubhouse behind the dugout.

You got to love it. Walsh says that a lot, probably because if he didn’t force himself to love both his career and current surroundings, he wouldn’t be able to stomach them.

The tiny clubhouse feels like a damp basement. A cold wind blows through holes in the cinder blocks that separate it from the dugout, stirring up dust around the small wooden cubicles.

As his teammates on the Tijuana Potros file in, most of them from Mexico, Walsh jokes with them in Spanish.

“You spend enough time down here or in other winter leagues, you’d better be fluent,” Walsh says. “You know how long I’ve been down here? It’s gotten so the manager and catcher actually speak Spanish to me on the mound.”

Many young American players will be spending these off-season months playing for teams in Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The Dodgers, in particular, encourage their prospects to play year-round.

But Walsh is different. This is his fourth season here, including once when, on the verge of quitting professional baseball to become a teacher, he played in this league during the summer .

“It’s tough to make it out of here when you play in the summer,” Walsh says. “Nobody can find you.”

The only reason the Dodgers found him was because, in the winter of 1988, they were scouting Chris Jones, his teammate on the Obregon club and former teammate in the Toronto organization.

“(Scout) Mike Brito took Chris out to dinner one night after we had combined to pitch a win, and Chris insisted that I tag along,” Walsh says. “He introduced me to Brito and reminded him that I had also pitched good that night, and that I was left-handed. Brito said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and the next thing I know, I have a contract.”

His four seasons in Mexico wear well on the soft-spoken Walsh. He knows not just the language of the league, but the dialect.

Before this game against Navojoa, he runs his laps effortlessly around the field despite the presence of two dogs in the infield and a maze of children swinging broken sticks in front of the dugout.

When he returns to the clubhouse, he passes out bags of sunflower seeds brought from the United States. He chips in a few coins to pay for the night’s coffee, which will be made with purified water.

Shortly before the game, he jogs to the visitors’ dugout and returns 15 minutes later with a big white box containing black leather cowboy boots.

“There’s a guy on their team who sells handmade cowboy boots; I just got a great deal on them,” Walsh says.

A guy on the opposing team sells shoes before games?

“Well, he’s not just any guy,” Walsh says with a smile. “He is today’s starting pitcher.”

Walsh laughs at the funny nuances of this league, probably because they remind him of those in his life.

The son of a Woodland Hills salesman who is also a recovering alcoholic, Walsh was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in 1982 in the ninth round out of UC Santa Barbara.

Walsh started drinking at 13 and by college was a heavy drinker. He hoped that turning professional would settle him down.

Three years later, after being warned by his triple-A manager for showing up drunk in airports for early morning flights, he knew he had overestimated himself.

His most vivid memory of his first season in Medicine Hat, a small Canadian town in the Pioneer League, was of being forced to step on a lit marijuana cigarette. He was hiding it after being confronted in a deserted parking lot by the police.

“They knew we were were ballplayers, so they let it pass,” Walsh says. “Too many times in my life, people have let things pass.”

By his third season, he was drinking every night and then smoking marijuana every morning to cure his hangover. He said he has never pitched while high but admitted that during that time, he probably never pitched while completely straight.

“All the time, I was in a zone,” he says.

Even when being Dave Walsh was good enough, such as the time he pitched a three-hit shutout for double-A Knoxville in 1984, it wasn’t good enough.

He was so excited about the victory, he celebrated deep into the night. The next day, he awoke with a swollen, painful left knee. It was the start of knee problems that required two operations and set his career back until he joined the Dodgers five years later.

“The bad thing about it was, I don’t know if I hurt the knee pitching or partying,” Walsh says. “That is something I will never know. I think that’s something I don’t want to know.”

He pauses, then continues: “Look at me, I’m 30 years old, and this spring will be my first big league training camp. Can you imagine where my career would be right now if I had been sane all this time?”

He drank throughout the remainder of the 1984 season. He would drink until he got sick, then drink some more.

“Actually, I should thank God I didn’t make it into the big leagues back then,” Walsh says. “Look at what Steve Howe went through. I should be glad I got all of this out of my system before anybody really had a chance to look at me.”

The cleansing began on Nov. 17, 1984. He accompanied his father and a friend to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where he admitted the obvious. He says he has not had a drink or an illegal drug since, and recently received his sixth birthday cake from the organization.

“I think everybody in my group is kind of amazed that I’ve actually made the Dodgers,” Walsh says. “All this time, and finally I show up in the big leagues. When I gave my speech at that last meeting, everybody really cheered.”

His life did not become instantly easier after he went straight. Drinking had set his career on a downward spiral that bottomed out when the Blue Jays loaned him to Laredo in the Mexican summer league in 1988.

While the caliber of baseball in the summer league ranges between double A and triple A, it is generally considered a place of no return. All of the true prospects are playing for affiliated minor league teams in the United States and Canada.

It was in Laredo that Walsh learned the meaning of 14-hour bus rides and illness so awful he went days on juice and crackers.

He remembers the time his sore shoulder was treated with a heat lamp that did nothing but give it a sunburn. He remembers driving 16 hours through the night to reach a game in a remote town, then stepping out of his car to pitch a one-hitter that he considers his greatest feat.

“Compared to some of the clubhouses in the league, the clubhouse in Tijuana is great,” Walsh says. “Playing there that summer taught me I could endure anything.”

As expected, the Blue Jays did not sign him after the 1988 season, and he was seriously considering life in the schoolroom when Brito took a chance on him.

Dodger Vice President Fred Claire explains: “Here was a guy who was left-handed, seemed to have pretty good stuff, why not take a chance?”

Walsh spent most of 1989 in double-A San Antonio, where he showed promise of settling down by striking out 63 in 55 2/3 innings. He began last season at triple-A Albuquerque, where he went 6-0 with 12 saves and a 2.61 earned-run average.

“Physically, (Albuquerque pitching coach) Claude Osteen took apart my motion,” Walsh says. “Mentally, I stopped being afraid to express myself on the mound, I stopped being afraid to have fun. And spiritually, I let the Lord handle everything else.”

He finally joined the Dodgers in August, making teammates chuckle at the shy pitcher who hardly spoke above a whisper.

“I remember standing in the Dodger clubhouse in Atlanta on my first day, and I was speechless,” Walsh says. “I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know how to act. I was overwhelmed.”

He retired the first two Braves he faced on two pitches, and from there, everything was easier.

Walsh says he doesn’t believe anything will ever be easy, which explains why he is sitting in a Tijuana dugout on this night, wearing a jacket and mittens, cheering on his fellow Potros along with several hundred in the stands.

In his first start for the Potros after joining them for the final month of the season, he gave up one run on two hits in five innings. The Dodgers were watching and were impressed.

Walsh will receive at least five starts as Tijuana battles to make the playoffs. But don’t think for a moment that they need him more than he needs them.

“Hey, did you bring the wisdom?” he suddenly asks a teammate.

The player pulls out a pack of chewing tobacco and offers it to Walsh.

“No, not the foolishness ,” Walsh says “The wisdom .”

“Oh,” the player says, “you mean the toilet paper? Yeah, it’s in my bag.”

“Thanks,” Walsh says, shrugging. “Hey . . . you got to love it.”