His Long, Winding Road to the Majors Has Been Strange : Angels: Until last season, Fortugno, 29, had never made it through a year without spending some time in Class A.

Baseball hasn’t been very good to Tim Fortugno yet, but he is ready and waiting.

He once had to try to make ends meet for his family of four on $500 a month, his salary with single-A Reno at the start of the 1989 season.

He has seen his ailing left arm cured by three weeks of painful acupuncture.

And--he wonders if he should mention this--he has left a room thinking his contract has been bought for $2,500, only to find out later that the general manager of the Reno Silver Sox asked the Milwaukee Brewers to throw in 12 dozen baseballs to sweeten the deal. The Brewers did.

“Vin Scully heard about it and mentioned it on the air,” Fortugno said. “And I got calls from back East saying, ‘Tim, we heard you got traded for a bunch of baseballs.’ ”

Until last season, Fortugno had never made it through a year without spending at least some time in Class A, surrounded by 18-year-olds. But this spring, Fortugno, who turns 30 April 11, is in a major league camp for the first time in his career, and the Angels are giving him a shot at a left-handed reliever’s role.

“This is the closest I’ve been by far,” Fortugno said.

It has been a long, strange ride for a boy from Massachusetts who was 24, married and a father when he signed his first professional contract in 1986.

Fortugno played baseball at Uxbridge High School in Massachusetts. But it was a small school--his graduating class was 90 students--and the weather kept the season short. Uxbridge would play maybe 18 games, and Fortugno would pitch in about eight.

“I was MVP of my team, and I probably made the all-star team of my league, but I don’t remember,” Fortugno said. “I lived in Massachusetts for 18 years and never went to Fenway Park. I didn’t know there was such a thing as minor league baseball. I was very naive.”

After graduation, he moved to California, intending to hook up with a friend of the family. The family friend was living in the San Joaquin Valley.

“I got to Bakersfield and I said, ‘This isn’t California,’ or not what I pictured it to be. I got on a Greyhound going south.”

He got off on the Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach. Soon after, with money running low, Fortugno found a job waiting tables in a restaurant at South Coast Plaza. It was there he met his wife, Kelly. Their first child, Justin, was born in December, 1981. Justin is now 10, and has a sister Alexandra, 4.

Fortugno went back to school the fall after Justin was born, and after three years away from the game, his baseball career began to blossom.

“I could always throw a baseball,” he said. “I was blessed with a good left arm. I was never that fanatical about it, but it’s always been in my blood.”

He started at Southern California College and did well. After his first season, he transferred to Golden West in order to be eligible for the draft after two years of school. He was selected by Oakland in the first round of the January draft that year, but before he could sign he endured a sub-par season and the first signs of arm trouble, going 2-0 with about five no-decisions, he said. Oakland decided not to sign him, and he returned to SCC. He had a so-so year and his arm bothered him more and more.

“I’d been to orthopedists, a chiropractor, even a neurologist, asking how come I couldn’t throw hard and my arm hurt,” he said.

Finally, at his wife’s urging, he decided to try an acupuncturist.

“I put it off, like the male ego was not going to listen to his wife, thinking it was all a bunch of voodoo,” he said. “But I figured I was at the end of my rope. It was this or nothing, it was over. I got the Yellow Pages and put my finger on a name. I decided I’d go to the first one who knew what I was talking about.”

He found an acupuncturist from Japan who didn’t speak much English, but he told Fortugno he had worked with athletes. Fortugno decided to try the treatment.

“He stuck four needles in my arm, three times a week,” Fortugno said. “One at the elbow, one in the biceps, one in the shoulder, one in the pec (pectoral muscle). It didn’t hurt much at first, but the second week, a friend went with me and said the needles were going in about an inch and a half.”

After about three weeks, Fortugno was able to throw 85 to 88 miles per hour again, after not being able to throw harder than 79 m.p.h.

“I don’t know all the theories. It has to do with blood flow or something, and it’s been around thousands of years,” Fortugno said.

All he knew was that it worked.

“I knew it was my very last chance to really bring my arm back. Maybe my mind decided to give it one more chance,” he said.

The next season, Fortugno was 9-2 with a 2.37 earned-run average and 153 strikeouts in 102 1/3 innings.

He wasn’t drafted, but Seattle signed him as a free agent. Fortugno went looking for the acupuncturist to tell him the news.

“I don’t know his name,” he said. “I know where he was located, but he wasn’t there anymore. I wanted to go back and thank him after my senior year. To this day, he was sort of a godsend to me.”

Since being signed by Seattle, Fortugno has played with 10 minor league teams. The Angels, who selected him in the Rule 5 draft in December, are his fourth organization.

“He’s got a good arm,” said Angel Manager Buck Rodgers. “Consistency would be his problem, or his secret.”

Fortugno is a strikeout pitcher. He has 620 in 484 2/3 professional innings. In 1987, he had 141 strikeouts in 93 innings for single-A Salinas.

But over those same 484 2/3 innings, he also has 340 walks.

Time is running out on the control issue.

“I’d say he’d better get it settled pretty quick,” Rodgers said, adding jokingly, “(being) 29 and wild is not a good combination.”

The walks have decreased. Last season, Fortugno walked 25 in 54 1/3 innings at double-A El Paso, and 20 in 35 1/3 innings at triple-A Denver.

Despite trouble with wildness, his ERAs have usually been quite good. He had a 1.99 ERA in 20 appearances with El Paso last season, and a 3.57 in 26 appearances with Denver.

Fortugno says his leanest time was in Reno in 1989, when he was playing with an unaffiliated team, hoping an organization would pick him up.

“I was 27, and I hooked up with five guys to rent a two-bedroom apartment. That was a pretty humbling experience,” he said. “There were a couple of guys on the team making $300 a month, but they were in the Cal League and they thought that was cool. I was embarrassed, but I knew it was the only way to stay in shape. After three weeks the Brewers bought my contract.”

His stint in Reno was one of the times his family wasn’t together. They couldn’t afford to be.

“I ate at the casinos, you know, breakfast for $1.99. And a buddy of mine had won the lottery, like $125,000. I’d say, “Where are we eating, your treat.’

“When you have two kids and you’re making $500 a month, you’ve got to love the game. I could never say die.”

In 1990, he found himself starting the season in Beloit, Wis., with a single-A team for the fifth season in a five-year career.

“I’m in the Midwest League and I’m 28 years old, and a lot of the kids thought I was a coach,” Fortugno said.

He doesn’t look out of place in the Angels’ spring clubhouse. He only hopes he can keep a place.

“I live about eight miles from the ballpark,” said Fortugno, whose family is living in Huntington Beach. “It would be outstanding if we can just go home.

“I don’t have an ounce of giving up in me, for lack of a better way to say it. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s a blue-collar work ethic from the Northeast, where you knew you had to work for everything you’ve got. I’ve been in the minor leagues six years, and it will be seven years if I have to return this year. If it’s meant for me to be in the major leagues, I’ll be there. I’ve got that philosophy in life.”