Gang’s All There for Dodgers, 3-2 : Baseball: They score twice in the ninth inning to beat the Giants and retain their one-game lead over the Braves.

With the Dodgers three outs from falling into a tie for first place Sunday night, those players who were out of the game and in the clubhouse were startled by a vision.

It was Eddie Murray, half dressed, telling everybody to get back in the dugout. Now.

“He was saying, ‘If we’re going to win this thing, we’re going to win it all together,’ ” Jim Gott recalled.

And so Mike Morgan in his cowboy boots, Gott with ice on his shoulder, Murray with a jacket covering his T-shirt, and everyone else in various stages of dress crowded next to the field.

Five batters and two runs later they were swarming the field after the Dodgers scored a 3-2 victory over the San Francisco Giants before 47,533 at Dodger Stadium.

Yes, the Dodgers not only won it, they won it all together.

Mike Scioscia bounced a single to left field. Stan Javier singled to right fieldfor his first pinch hit in 43 days.

Brett Butler hit a grounder to second base and ended up on second base after rookie Jose Offerman skillfully prolonged a rundown between third and home.

Mike Sharperson tied the score with a ground ball that reached the glove of third baseman Matt Williams shortly before a chunk of Sharperson’s broken bat.

And Darryl Strawberry--”The Money Man,” Butler said--won it with a single to right-center field on a 1-and-2 pitch from Dave Righetti. It was Strawberry’s first hit in 12 at-bats, and perhaps made people forget about the 10 runners he had stranded during that time.

“This is a real bad time for me to be scuffling, but there’s one thing that being around this game has taught me,” Strawberry said. “You always know you are going to get another chance.”

As a team that rarely wastes second chances, the first-place Dodgers maintain a one-game lead over the Atlanta Braves with six games remaining.

“Tonight was amazing,” Butler said.

“It was electric,” Gott said.

Strawberry preferred to think about how the Braves, who had pulled out a third consecutive late-inning victory over the Houston Astros earlier in the day, were feeling.

“I’m quite sure they were watching this game and wondering, ‘What is it going to take to beat these guys?” Strawberry said.

The teams have only six more games to figure it out.

The Braves will play three games in Cincinnati against the Reds, where the Braves have won five of six games this season. Then they will finish the season at home with three games against the last-place Astros, whom they have beaten 11 times in 15 meetings.

The Dodgers will play three games at Dodger Stadium against the San Diego Padres, against whom they are 8-7. Then they will finish the season with three games against the Giants at Candlestick Park, where they have won only two of six games this season and nine of 24 in the last three seasons.

To a man, the Dodgers do not want to travel to Candlestick with less than a two-game lead.

“As far as we’re concerned, these next three games with the Padres are the big ones,” Strawberry said.

“I’m trying not even to think about Candlestick Park right now. We need to get ourselves in good shape before we go there.”

But for a team that has come back from an eighth-inning deficit to win twice in nine days--they did it against the Braves Sept. 21--big games are now routine.

“There’s like a quiet confidence in the dugout, like we know what to do,” said Gott, who got the victory Sunday with 1 2/3 scoreless innings in relief of Mike Morgan and John Candelaria.

“It doesn’t matter if we are facing a deficit, it’s like, when it gets to the late stages of a game, we know how to turn it on,” Gott said.

The Dodgers managed to turn it on when necessary throughout this game, particularly Morgan.

The first three Giant batters in the game got hits, but Morgan worked out of the jam while yielding only one run.

He was in a bases-loaded, none-out jam in the sixth inning, but held the Giants scoreless.

“I really don’t think I’ve been in those types of situations much this year, and then to get out of it . . . I wasn’t doing too much thinking out there,” said Morgan, who maintained his earned-run average at 2.79, among the league leaders.

“I was just bearing down.”

He was saved in the sixth inning when Thompson, doing about the only thing he could do without driving in a run, hit a ball right back to Morgan, who threw to catcher Scioscia to start a double play. Scioscia also saved a run in the fifth when he extended his left arm and short-hopped a wide relay throw from Lenny Harris to tag out Mike Felder at the plate.

This set the stage for the two Dodgers rallies, beginning in the eighth when Kal Daniels followed singles by Sharperson and Murray with a grounder that Righetti was unable to bare-hand. The pitcher turned the wrong way and could not throw Daniels out, allowing Sharperson to score.

“He turns the right way, he gets me,” Daniels said.

With the score tied, Scioscia started the ninth with his hit, bringing up Javier, who only swung away and singled to right because he could not get down a bunt. He now has five hits in 51 pinch at-bats, an .098 average.

* BRAVES WIN: Atlanta let a 5-0 lead get away but came back to beat Houston, 6-5, in the 13th inning. C16

* TWINS CLINCH: Minnesota needed help to wrap up the AL West title and got it when Seattle defeated Chicago. C14