Two Stars Pitch in Pain; Yankees Feeling the Hurt : Baseball: Key and Kamieniecki struggle to recover in Florida while watching their team’s season go slowly to pieces.

The New York Yankees are dying for pitching. Down here in the rehabilitation division, Jimmy Key and Scott Kamieniecki are simply dying. It’s a ballplayer’s term: How did you do in Baltimore? “I died.”

The pain in Key’s arm won’t kill him, but it could kill his career, and his absence surely is killing the Yankees. All the Strawberrys in the world are not a cure for what ails them.

Key was merely the Yankees’ best pitcher the last two seasons. He won more games last season than any pitcher in baseball. Kamieniecki was giving hints that he was growing into the job. He was supposed to be the No. 4 starter, maybe No. 3.

Now for the good news: They both threw from off the mound here last Friday and decided it had been a positive experience. Kamieniecki said he felt some pain in his sprained elbow but hoped that it was a remainder of a month of inactivity. Key declared that his shoulder was no better but no worse and he probably could function if it didn’t get any worse.

But both are frightened.

“You never know,” Kamieniecki said. “You don’t know if you’ve thrown your last pitch or not. I’m not ready to give it up yet.”

Pitchers live with the uncertainty. The body isn’t designed to throw a baseball overhand as hard and as many times as a pitcher does in a career.

Darryl Strawberry ran some and fielded some Friday and drew a crowd of eyes, young and old, when he stepped into the batting cage. The young eyes were those of a handful of fans and the assembled youth of the Yankees and Detroit teams of the Florida State League, rookies all. The old eyes belonged to Yankees instructor Clete Boyer and scout Dick Williams, and Detroit Tiger instructor Larry Parrish, who summoned a youngster to watch Strawberry’s hands and see how they whipped the bat so quickly out of an easy swing through the timing arc of the hitting zone.

“He’s got bat speed; he’s got everything,” Williams declared. “It’s just a matter if he has everything together.” The man who once managed Reggie Jackson said Strawberry would be ready to move up in a week to 10 days.

Key, 34, and Kamieniecki, 31, still have to throw more than straight fastballs. They have to deal with simulated games, real games against minor-leaguers, extended outings. They’ve been out since early May. They’re talking about weeks more, and, as Key pointed out, it’s almost July. Steinbrenner insists they’re still trying to get a pitcher, “but nobody wants to help the Yankees, you know that.”

Kamieniecki acknowledges the pressure. It was tough when he was sidelined in New York and still expecting the pain to abate. “You sit there and watch the team struggle and not be able to help,” he said. “I come down here and watch them on TV. I feel like I abandoned them.”

He’s a college-try fellow. He has a degree from Michigan, where he was the best pitcher on the team and was used or misused as the team needed him. Maybe his problem began there. Like so many pitchers who once had arm problems, he’s always checking himself to see if he feels all right. Is it normal stiffness the day after he pitches and the day he runs and the middle day he throws or the next day, or the day he gets back on the mound? “If it doesn’t hurt, it’s a relief,” he said.

This time he thought the stiffness in spring training after the long layoff was normal, and kept trying to throw through the discomfort as his outings were extended. “It doesn’t hurt now,” he said. “But I’ve got to be careful. I don’t want to jump in. I’m vulnerable.”

Key said he never questioned his arm before he was hurt the first time. He was on the Toronto Blue Jays’ disabled list in 1988, ’89 and ’90. He had shoulder surgery in ’88 and ’89. Key turned down a Toronto three-year contract offer. Perhaps the Blue Jays were too timid to take too much chance. He signed with the Yankees and has pitched like hell for them.

He had arm surgery last winter.

When Key shut himself down with the Yankees earlier this season, he measured the pain as “10.” Now it’s “five.” When it was “10,” there was no way he could pitch. He said he can live with “five.” If it doesn’t get worse. That’s the great question. “I don’t know if it will get worse,” he said, “or if I’ll wake up and the pain will be gone.”

Key raised his left arm in demonstration. “Right here,” he said. “Right when I go to let the ball go, I know it’s going to hurt. I’ve got to be mentally able to block it out.”

He is a precision pitcher; when the pain is right there at the release, he has no precision.

Roger Clemens can give up precision if he has velocity. “I’d trade three or four m.p.h. for location,” Key said. “Last year when I was pitching well, I didn’t have as much velocity but I was able to locate well.”

The best-case scenario, he said, was to “be back in a couple of weeks, my arm doesn’t bother me the rest of the years, we finish first and go to the World Series.” He smiled.

The Yankees’ desperate situation is almost an afterthought. Key is a professional. “I want to pitch if we’re 10 games in front or 10 games behind, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “This is what I do. By no means do I want to quit. I’m not going to pitch at a lesser level than I’m used to.”

Hitters go on to ripe old age. Pitchers’ arms tell them when it’s over. “I’d hate to have my career end not on my terms,” Kamieniecki said. “That’s what every player is afraid of.”