Hershiser Continues His Climb : Dodgers: He hopes to pitch four more years, realizing his 1988 accomplishments are all but impossible to match.

It was the winter after a most remarkable 1988 season that Orel Hershiser began to understand.

After rising to feed his new son in the middle of the night, Hershiser would sit and watch his many accomplishments on highlight film. That’s when the realization set in. That’s when he knew he was about to face the biggest fall of his life.

So, Hershiser went on his way, dogged by the attention given a president, and deservedly so. After winning 23 games, throwing 59 consecutive scoreless innings and pitching the Dodgers to the 1988 World Series championship, even the tabloid reporters were grilling Hershiser’s friends.

You know you’ve made it when that happens. Hershiser’s Cy Young season had been a career.

It’s not easy setting the standard by which you are judged, but Hershiser did, and has paid for it--with a blown-out shoulder and overblown expectations.

“People ask me all the time about Orel,” said his father, Orel Hershiser III. “But 1988 was a phenomenal year.”

However unreal, it was engraved in the hearts of many who wonder what has happened since.

So what if Hershiser had arm surgery a season later. Inquiring minds wonder when is he going to throw like 1988 again.

“I don’t know what others expectations are of me, but I would say there is a wide range, from the person who thinks I should be completely finished and is surprised every time I take the mound, to the person that expects the same person who pitched in 1988 to perform out there, and can’t understand why,” Hershiser said. “I think both opinions are valid and both are naive at the same time.

“They are valid in the fact that the person who thinks I shouldn’t be pitching is probably right because I had a career-ending injury, and the person who expects the 1988 person to show up is probably valid because it has been accomplished by this body that has this name on it. But both are naive because there has been a long time since the surgery, I have proven that I’m back.

“But as far as 1988 is concerned, I think history proves that not many people are ever going to see a year like that, be it Orel Hershiser or anybody else.”

Way before 1988, Hershiser was a star. He won 60 games in his first four seasons with the Dodgers and in 1985, was 19-3 with a 2.03 earned-run average. By the time 1988 arrived, he had pitched 923 innings. Then he pitched 267 more before the postseason. He pitched another 24 in four games against the New York Mets, then had two complete-game victories in the World Series against Oakland.

Of course everybody remembers Hershiser. He was on the mound so much. But in 1990, Hershiser’s rubber arm lasted only four starts. By then he had pitched another 256 innings during 1989, going 15-15 with a 2.31 ERA.

He began feeling the pain in his right shoulder. During the spring before the 1990 season, Hershiser visited Prakash Dalal, a massage therapist in Vero Beach, Fla., who specializes in alleviating pain. He helped, but Hershiser’s shoulder was damaged. Soon after, team orthopedist Frank Jobe was reconstructing it with a new surgical method. No one knew if Hershiser would pitch again.

“Orel has been coming to me every spring since,” Dalal said, “but this spring something phenomenal has happened. He has more velocity and is more fluid, and his shoulder feels better then even before he had the discomfort.”

Hershiser spent 90 minutes a day with Dalal for the past four springs. Dalal worked on muscles to free his range of motion and improve flexibility. “Orel would come to me the day after pitching five innings and I would say, ‘How do you feel?’ And he would say, ‘Fantastic,’ ” Dalal said. “I’m not a pitching expert, but I think he has had a major breakthrough. With a little bit of luck and help from above, you may see a miracle.”

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Hershiser will open the Dodgers’ 1994 season Tuesday, the fourth time he has been so honored. Manager Tom Lasorda loves his Bulldog, a nickname Lasorda gave him. With a name like Orel, Lasorda figured he had to do something.

“I think that helped him as much as anything,” said Orel’s father.

It will be Hershiser’s 11th season with the Dodgers, the only remaining player from the 1988 World Series team. He is also in the last season of his contract, will turn 36 in September, and hopes to be pitching four more years--with the Dodgers. He is one of only eight active major league players who have 10 years service with one club.

“Everybody says, ‘What a great accomplishment,’ but I don’t know anything different,” Hershiser said. “So, to say, ‘Don’t you feel special?’ is to say, ‘Don’t you feel like Orel Hershiser?’ Yes I do. But I’m just fortunate enough to experience what I am experiencing.”

But for the first spring since his surgery, Hershiser says he is beginning to feel normal. Hershiser has pitched poorly in the three seasons since his surgery, but given the circumstances, it has been phenomenal that he pitched at all. He has compiled a 29-31 record in 538 innings and 87 starts the past three seasons and has led the staff in innings pitched the past two. Overall, he has a record of 128-96 with a 2.95 ERA in 322 games and 2,020 innings.

More importantly, Hershiser says his wife Jamie and sons Quinton (age 10) and Jordan (5) have taught him to be more balanced in a life that includes a strong religious faith. There are times when Hershiser starts focusing in a couple of days before he pitches, and Jamie will remind him that it’s too soon.

“She will say, let me have you another day,” Hershiser said. “She and the kids have helped me learn how to be all the different type of people I have to be.”

During the 1988 season, Hershiser said he was afraid to let his game face down, even when forced to. When Jordan was born in the middle of his scoreless inning streak and was in intensive care, Hershiser left the team to be with Jamie. But when it was his turn to pitch again, he flew to Houston and threw a shutout, one of five consecutive shutouts during his record-setting streak.

It’s those days of greatness that Hershiser is striving to return to, but fortunately the crazed fanfare has dulled somewhat. The day before the Dodgers left for Florida this spring, Hershiser ate lunch at a small restaurant in Pasadena. He found a spot at the counter and sat alone, watching the Winter Olympics on television.

He wasn’t there long when Fred Claire, Dodger executive vice president, walked in with a few family members.

“And there’s Orel sitting at the counter by himself,” Claire said. “And he tells me later that when he went home, Jamie and the kids wanted to come back that night and eat.”

For Hershiser, life might finally be normal again--his kind of normal.