Ojeda Tries, but Can’t Do It All : Dodgers: Pitcher hits home run to account for only Los Angeles runs in 3-2 loss to Expos. Butler extends streak to 22.

Bob Ojeda’s season was typified Thursday night when the fan who caught his first career home run would return it only in exchange for three souvenir baseballs.

Autographed by Orel Hershiser.

Ojeda’s season, which reached another frustrating low in a 3-2 loss to the Montreal Expos, was also typified by the foreign object that dangled between his lips afterward while he dressed in front of his locker.

The Dodgers have driven him to smoke in the clubhouse.

“To be perfectly honest, this is giving me a lot of gray hairs,” Ojeda said. “After a while, it gets to you. Who knows, maybe my ex-wife has a voodoo doll.”

Before 13,133 at Olympic Stadium, the first-place Dodgers began the season’s second half as if suddenly cursed. Wasting scoring chances in five of the first eight innings, they blew a chance to pick up a game on the losing Cincinnati Reds.

They also failed to offer the welcome that Ojeda has been waiting for since joining the team this winter.

After Ojeda’s second-inning, two-run home run into the right-field bleachers tied the game, 2-2, the Dodgers could not score again against Mark Gardner and Scott Ruskin. A third-inning home run by Ivan Calderon off Ojeda was enough to eventually beat him.

Not that he was surprised. In his 16 starts this season, Ojeda’s teammates have scored 2.1 runs per game when he is on the mound. If it wasn’t for his offense, which has accounted for five runs batted in, they would have given him 1.8 runs per game.

With Ojeda, this has become more than merely a statistical trend. It has become a mind game.

This was evident to anyone who watched him walk three of the first four hitters in the first inning, leading to two runs.

“Sure, you think about it. It’s like, I’ve really got to hold people down, or I’m in trouble.” said Ojeda, who gave up three runs and five hits before being removed for a pinch-hitter in the sixth inning after retiring seven of his last eight hitters.

This former 18-game winner for the 1986 World Series champion New York Mets also issued a warning that if the Dodgers don’t play better for the next 10 games of this trip, they could be in trouble.

“This is a huge trip for us, and we need to break out . . . like, tomorrow,” said Ojeda, 7-6 despite a 3.23 earned-run average. “You don’t always win divisions in September, sometimes you win in July. The time to prove that we are the best in the West is right now.”

It was not a good sign that with the Dodgers’ season at its actual 81-game halfway point, some of their best players looked tired.

Juan Samuel, with his batting average in danger of dropping below the .300 mark, went hitless in five at-bats to worsen his current slump to six for 35, a .171 average.

Eddie Murray, hitless in three at-bats, has six hits in his last 57 trips, a .105 skid that has dropped his average to .256.

With the exception of Ojeda and Brett Butler, whose fifth-inning single extended his hitting streak to 22 games, a major league high this season, no Dodger hitter had a night to be proud of.

But even Butler didn’t help Ojeda. He made the final out to end the Dodgers’ best rally in the sixth, after they had loaded the bases with one out on a walk to Kal Daniels, a bad-hop single by Gary Carter and a bunt single by Alfredo Griffin.

Stan Javier, pinch-hitting for Ojeda, struck out, giving him an .083 average as a pinch-hitter with no pinch-hits in 11 at-bats left-handed. Butler then hit a grounder up the middle that second baseman Delino DeShields nimbly caught as he appeared to step on second base for the final out.

DeShields apparently told some Dodgers that he never touched the base, only the dirt in front of the base. But they were not placated.

“They tried to give us the game, and we wouldn’t take it,” Manager Tom Lasorda said.

The Dodgers are 0-3 this year at Olympic Stadium, and have won once here in nine games since 1989. It seems that for them to win here, it will take plays like Ojeda’s home run, which stunned him so much that he looked three times at the right-field wall while running the bases.

“My only other home run came off Mel Stottlemyre . . . in batting practice with the Mets in 1986,” said Ojeda, who had 270 at-bats before the homer. “The reason I kept looking at it tonight was that the umpire took his time calling it. I don’t think he believed it either.”