Dodgers’ Result Is Foregone Conclusion : Baseball: They lose to the Braves, 7-1, and are mathematically eliminated from the division race.

Stop the presses. The Dodgers have been mathematically eliminated from the National League West Division race.

This startling news spread quickly through their clubhouse after a 7-1 loss to the first-place Atlanta Braves Monday, causing a mixture of feelings that could be best expressed in one sentence.

What, it took this long?

“Well, you know, I think we’ve already been out of it,” Eric Karros said.

Across the room, Tom Candiotti was just as emotional.

“When you play bad, bad things happen,” he said. “You get eliminated.”

When Brett Butler grounded to shortstop Rafael Belliard to end their 14th loss in 17 games, the Dodgers quietly departed the dugout with the same apparent numbness that has recently marked their play.

“It’s like, we’re in a grieving state,” Butler said.

There were, however, two extraordinary items about the defeat that left the Dodgers 26 1/2 games behind the Braves with 25 games to play.

This elimination occurred on the second earliest date in Los Angeles Dodger history, and at the earliest point since the 1968 team was eliminated on Sept. 1 with 26 games remaining.

It is also the earliest elimination in Tom Lasorda’s professional managerial career, dating to 1965 in Pocatello, Ida.

Lasorda responded by staying in uniform late, until more than an hour after the end of the game, leaning back behind his desk and talking softly.

“I feel very, very sorry for Peter O’Malley (club president),” he said. “Peter gave us all an opportunity to make a lucrative living, and we weren’t able to give it back to him.”

The red-letter defeat ironically occurred at the site of last season’s dramatic championship battles.

Only this time, 40,322 fans at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium were either too bored or filled with pity to even chant “Beat L.A.”

Lasorda spoke as if those glory days were decades ago.

“I remember what it was like to come into these parks on top of the heap, battling for the pennant, everybody wanted to talk to us, everything was very exciting,” Lasorda said. “But now . . . we’ve really been out of it since the first of August.”

Lasorda said it is even sadder to look at a statistics sheet, which tells the story of the early elimination more directly than any prose. “If somebody would have told me that in September, Mike Scioscia would have more stolen bases (three) than home runs (two) . . . or that Darryl Strawberry and Eric Davis would have 10 home runs combined. . . . I would have told them they were crazy,” he said.

Other oddities haunt the Dodgers:

--Jose Offerman has more errors (37) than Dave Hansen has runs batted in (21).

--Lenny Harris has played in as many games (117) as Strawberry and Davis combined.

--Butler ranks second on the team with 37 RBIs.

--The top individual save total (12, by Roger McDowell) is two fewer than the number of team blown saves (14).

“As much as we always hoped that we could turn things around, we always knew that with injuries and inexperience, nothing would happen,” Candiotti said.

Nothing even happened Monday after John Smoltz began the game by throwing 10 consecutive balls.

Then with runners on first and second and a count of 2-and-0 on Strawberry, Smoltz suddenly discovered something by striking out the next three batters.

From there it was another typical Dodger game, this time with rookie Pedro Astacio as the victim.

The Braves scored three runs in the fourth inning thanks in part to an error by Harris and a slow throw home by Strawberry. Atlanta added another run in the sixth after Lonnie Smith had his first steal of the season.

“I guess I always thought we would bounce back and be all right,” Butler said. “I never thought it would come to this.”