Fresh Chance, Fresh Outlook : Bob Ojeda: After hedge-clipper incident and midnight rides to let off frustration with Mets, pitcher welcomes a place in Dodgers’ rotation.

It is not that Bob Ojeda has never seen bad before.

He has lived bad. He has eaten bad.

“Winter Haven (Fla.), 1979, Class-A ball, we were so poor, I ate Sucrets for dinner,” recalled Ojeda, one of the new Dodger pitchers. “Took them out of a jar in the training room every night. Sucrets.”

But until last year, Ojeda always has been able to pitch his way out of bad. With a strong left arm and stronger will, he always has escaped to a better place.

Last year, buried in the bullpen of the New York Mets, he was stuck. He wasn’t pitching, he wasn’t happy, he had nowhere to go.

He couldn’t escape. So he just pretended to escape. He took a summer-long joy-ride on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

“Rode it until it nearly killed me,” Ojeda said.

A Met charter flight would land in New York at 2 a.m. after a trip. Most of the players would trudge home to their families and bed.

Ojeda would climb on his bike and ride until he saw the sun.

“I’m wearing my good suit and these ostrich shoes, and I’m going through these neighborhood streets on Long Island like a wild man,” Ojeda said. “It’s pitch dark out, I’m bombed, I didn’t care. I would just ride and ride.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t get killed.”

One morning, just before dawn, Ojeda’s motorcycle stopped running at the bottom of a hill leading to his house. He climbed off and began pushing.

“Here I am, pushing this bike in my suit, and here come all my neighbors, driving down the hill on the way to work,” Ojeda said. “They all slowed down and stared at me. They were probably thinking I was crazy. And I finally realized, they were right.”

The next afternoon, Ojeda called his brother-in-law and sold him the motorcycle.

“I told him, ‘If you don’t take it, I die,’ ” Ojeda said. “It was an easy sell.”

He also thinks it was an omen, because several months later, he was traded to the Dodgers with minor league pitcher Greg Hansell in exchange for Hubie Brooks.

Just like that, he became a starting pitcher again. He feels appreciated again.

Thus he is approaching this season like a man living out a happy ending. He may be owed a few.

“I feel so good, I even went out and bought another motorcycle,” Ojeda said. “Nice, big Heritage. Color is Dodger blue.”

He paused and smiled. “No, don’t worry,” he said. “I think my days of midnight rides are through.”

The Dodgers hope so. They are counting on Ojeda, a left-hander, to continue showing the same fearlessness on the mound.

Last year, opponents batted only .224 against him with runners on base. Since he was traded from the Boston Red Sox to the Mets in 1986, he has allowed only three hits in 31 at-bats with the bases loaded, the lowest average in that situation of any pitcher in the major leagues during that time.

Statistics such as those cause the Dodgers to overlook his being only 7-6 with a 3.66 earned-run average last season, and 33-35 the past four seasons.

“He sort of reminds me of myself,” pitching coach Ron Perranoski said. “He will give up a hit here or there, but he stays away from the big inning.

“About him, guys say, ‘It takes three hits to score off him.’ And those hits may be ground balls through the infield.”

Barry Lyons, who is competing for a backup catching job with the Dodgers after working with Ojeda for four years in New York, agreed with Perranoski.

“The reason people loved him in New York, and the reason I think they will love him here, is that he goes out and really battles the hitters,” Lyons said. “He’ll give up hits, but he’ll stay away from the big innings because he just will not give in.”

Why should he start now?

Ojeda is famous for continuing his career despite nearly severing the tip of his left middle finger in an electric hedge-clipper accident late in the 1988 season.

But by that time, Ojeda had already recovered from enough hard times to view the incident as just another bad afternoon.

“I remember that the New York TV stations broke into a soap opera to talk about my accident,” Ojeda said. “I thought, ‘This is crazy. Is my finger that big of a deal?’ ”

Today, the only reminder of the accident is a permanent swelling where surgeons reattached the fingertip. And, of course, there are always the jokes.

“I can’t tell you how many teammates have asked me to do lawn work for them since then,” said Ojeda, who has gone 20-17 with a 3.54 ERA since the accident.

“No, I don’t use that damn hedge-clipper thing anymore. But I still saw down trees. What’s the big deal?”

It takes more than a career-threatening injury to slow down the personable Ojeda, who has been so inspired during camp that Dodger catchers have asked him to take it easy to avoid peaking in March.

He remembers a blue-collar childhood in Visalia, far north of his birthplace in Anaheim. His father upholstered furniture and drove cars that broke down.

“A lot of my childhood memories center around bad cars,” Ojeda said. “Big, broken-down Ramblers. Old Cadillacs.

“We’d go to the Sav-On drugstore for a tube of toothpaste, car would break down, trip would take us 2 1/2 hours. For a damn tube of toothpaste.”

For that reason, Ojeda says he has a phobia about cars breaking down.

“Now I only buy cars I can’t kill,” he said.

The rest of Ojeda’s adolescence didn’t always work so well, either.

“I was a real brain surgeon,” he said. “I once wanted to see what would happen when you put gasoline on a barbecue. Nearly blew myself up.

“Another time I tried to do funny things while riding my minibike and ended up going off a bridge and into a ditch.”

By the time he realized he wanted to play baseball, he was playing in obscurity at the College of Sequoias. And even the scout who eventually signed him didn’t feel he had much of a chance.

“He threw the ball hard, but that was it,” said Larry Flynn, who is still scouting the Visalia area for Boston. “I did not expect him to make it. But I figured he might impress somebody for a couple of years, so I said, ‘What the heck.’ ”

Flynn said he remembered coaching a Little League team that faced Ojeda, who threw harder than anybody in town.

“Before the game, I asked him not to throw so hard because I worried about the safety of my 12-year-olds,” Flynn said. “Of course, he didn’t care what I said. He threw just as hard and struck nearly all of those boys out.

“It was that attitude that I liked in him.”

So at 21, with no hopes of being drafted, Ojeda signed with Flynn as a free agent. He was given a $500 bonus and sent off to Elmira, N.Y., to play in Class A.

Oh, yes. By this time, Ojeda already had a wife and a baby daughter. “Like I said, I was a real brain surgeon,” he said. “Getting married so young, having a baby right away.”

The next thing Ojeda can remember is walking to the grocery store in Elmira because they had no car, then bringing home the groceries in a cart.

“One time it rained, and the front wheel of the cart came off,” he said. “The baby starts crying, the groceries are getting wet and we’re trying to get everybody home to the apartment. I still remember how those wet groceries felt.”

By the next season, at Winter Haven, Ojeda and his wife were parents of another child. His problems more than doubled.

“We lived in this little hotel room at the Holiday Inn, and we couldn’t afford money for a dryer, so we had to hang the diapers around the room,” he said. “Once you’ve lived in a place wallpapered by diapers, you never forget it.”

Because of their money troubles, Ojeda would eat Sucrets at the stadium. For a real treat, his family would mix dry spaghetti with potatoes.

“I realize I made my own bed with having the wife and children so fast,” Ojeda said. “And I slept in that bed without complaining. I’m not complaining now.

“This is just to show why I appreciate everything I have and take nothing for granted.”

Take his contract, which includes an option year for 1992 worth $1.6 million. That would make him a bargain, but unlike many other major leaguers these days, he has not asked for an extension or a renegotiated deal.

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “I will never, ever complain about making $1.6 million.

“People tell me if I had a better contract, I could make $8 million over the next three years. I say, ‘The heck with you. You’re talking to a guy who ate Sucrets. I’ll take what I can get.’ ”

One casualty of those early years was his marriage, which ended in divorce. But the attitude he adopted during that time made him one of the Mets’ most popular players after he was traded by Boston after the 1985 season.

It helped that in his first season in New York he went 18-5 with a 2.56 ERA and helped lead the Mets to a World Series championship.

“Maybe it’s because I always love wherever I’m at, but I loved New York,” Ojeda said. “The people there love the Mets. We were huge. I haven’t waited in a line in five years.”

He explained: “I’d be walking down a street in Manhattan, and some construction worker on a third floor would shout down, ‘Hey, Bobby O, howarya doing?’ I would go to a Billy Joel concert and get to stand on the stage and get kissed by Christie Brinkley.”

This affair with his fans came to a crushing end for Ojeda last spring during a meeting in the outfield of Port St. Lucie (Fla.) Stadium. Davey Johnson, then manager of the Mets, had gathered his starting pitchers for a conference.

Since the acquisition of Frank Viola in 1989, the Mets had six starters and needed only five.

“He talked about how one of us would have to go to the bullpen, then all of a sudden he mentioned my name,” Ojeda said. “It was like somebody hit me with a hammer. I didn’t understand what I had done.”

At the time, Ojeda had a cumulative 3.02 ERA in four Met seasons. In the three seasons he had made at least 20 starts, he had a 2.96 ERA.

“If get the ball a lot, I’m not going to get bombed,” Ojeda said. “But I guess they didn’t understand that.”

He eventually made 12 spot starts last year, but he said he felt so bitter, it was hard to concentrate. His statistics show that; he went 4-5 with a 4.76 ERA.

He pitched only 9 1/3 innings in the final month of the season, when he said the Mets “insulted” him by recalling minor leaguer Julio Valera and inserting him into the rotation. In three starts, Valera was rocked for 10 runs and 20 hits in 13 innings.

“Imagine, starting a rookie in a pennant race. It was insulting to the whole pitching staff,” Ojeda said. “I don’t know how it got so ugly, so fast. It was a terrible ending to the best experience of my life.

“I’ll miss the Mets, but for what they were. Not for what they’ve become.”

At the end of the season, Frank Cashen, the Mets’ general manager, told Ojeda he would be traded somewhere he could start.

“But when he called later in the winter and told me it was to the Dodgers, I couldn’t believe it,” Ojeda said. “I actually said, ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’ ”

Ojeda was even happier during a conference call with Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda immediately after the announcement.

Lasorda told Ojeda he was going to be in the rotation.

Ojeda replied: “Tommy, I could kiss you.”

The Dodgers will be happy to know that the only thing stronger than Ojeda’s fortitude is his gratitude.

For several years, he and his family have been buying Christmas presents for underprivileged families in the Visalia area.

He has also taken a special interest in the Tule River Indians, a tribe located in the nearby mountains. He helped raise about $70,000 to build them a school.

“They are a group of people struggling to help themselves, and I can understand that,” he said of the Indians. “They are underdogs. And I understand all about underdogs.”