Piazza Turns Up Volume : Baseball: After blowing up after Wednesday night’s loss, he goes three for four in helping Dodgers defeat Braves, 7-5.

He likes to play baseball as if he is tearing somebody’s head off, but fortunately for everybody, it’s only the cover off a fastball that feels the wrath of Mike Piazza. Once in a while he throws things in the dugout, like a water jug, as he did after the Dodgers’ loss at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium the other night.

But with few exceptions this season, Piazza channels his aggressiveness against his opponent, as he did Thursday night by helping the Dodgers to a 7-5 victory over the Atlanta Braves. And at the end of the night, when Piazza’s three hits were in the box score and he had helped stop the Braves’ nine-game winning streak and his pitcher’s four-game losing streak, Piazza talked about what was the most satisfying to him. And it wasn’t his hitting.

“Kevin (Gross) and I talked after the game and he told me that I caught a good game and said, ‘You really helped me out, you helped me get a good target and keep the ball down,’ and that’s what is important to me,” said Piazza, who went three for four with one run scored and one run batted in.

For Gross (8-11), who hadn’t won since July 8, it was a breakthrough that came without his good stuff. “It was ugly, but it was a win,” he said. “We came out scoring and knocked out one of the best pitchers in the National League.”

The Dodgers jumped on Tom Glavine (14-5) for four runs in the first inning, with Piazza and Eric Karros each hitting run-scoring doubles and Eric Davis hitting his 13th home run, a two-run shot over the center-field wall.

They added another run in the second, when Mike Sharperson doubled and later scored on a single by Jose Offerman, and chased Glavine during the third after Cory Snyder walked and Karros hit another double to the gap in left-center.

With none out, Marvin Freeman relieved Glavine before Tim Wallach’s single to the hole at short scored Snyder and gave the Dodgers a 6-2 lead. Glavine, pitching on three days’ rest for the third consecutive start since the Braves went to a four-man rotation, was charged with six runs and six hits in two-plus innings, equaling his shortest start of the season.

But Gross, pitching without his curveball, was also off to a shaky start, walking the bases loaded in the first inning, but stopping the damage at two runs before a fine throw by Piazza to Wallach nailed a sliding David Justice at third base and ended the Braves’ rally. The defense came through again in the second inning when, with two out, Davis charged Otis Nixon’s single to left and made a perfect throw to Piazza, who blocked a charging Mark Lemke and held on to make the tag.

But Manager Tom Lasorda said he started praying in the ninth inning, when the Braves, who had cut the Dodgers’ lead to 7-4, had runners on second and third with one out. Jim Gott, who had bailed out Pedro Martinez in the eighth inning, managed to pitch out the jam and earn his 23rd save.

At times, it is difficult to remember that Piazza, who has led the team in nearly every major category all season, is still a rookie. And at times, it seems as if Piazza forgets, too. When he makes a rare mistake, doesn’t come through at the plate or the Dodgers suffer a tough loss, such as they did Wednesday night, Piazza gets loud. After that game, he threw a couple of water jugs in the dugout, then continued to rant into the clubhouse and was still upset on the bus ride back to the hotel.

“It’s not losing so much, but how you lose,” he said. “I guess I take losses personally and sometimes I throw things and get mad, but I just don’t like to lose. A well-played game that you lose is one thing, but when you do the type of things that we have been doing, I know we are a better team than that, and that is what makes it frustrating.

“It would be easy to say ‘OK, we are out of it,’ but we can’t do that, we have to keep playing hard. We need to end the season on a positive note as a team.”