To Start a Run, Dodger Arms Need to Deliver

You can dredge up the tired issues of chemistry and attitude.

You can worry about Todd Hundley’s progress or the overall offensive production or the ever-changing composition of the bullpen and whether Jeff Shaw can duplicate his 48 saves of 1998.

You can panic in mid-May if you choose, but the better thing, a quarter of the way through a 162-game season, would be to lean back, breathe deeply and focus on one thing and one thing only with the Dodgers:

If a starting rotation that could be, and should be, one of baseball’s best performs to expectations, all other concerns are minimized.

“This team was built around its starting pitching,” Manager Davey Johnson noted. “Everything revolves around that pitching.”

Hard to argue. Look at it this way:

Did the Dodgers pay $80 million for Mo Vaughn or $87.5 million for Bernie Williams or $91 million to bring back Mike Piazza?

The Dodgers ranked 12th in the league in runs last year.

Offensive improvements were made strictly on margin, trading for catcher Hundley, who may or may not return to pre-surgery form, and signing 36-year-old center fielder Devon White.

White, with his fifth big league team, got $12.4 million, but the real money, and the obvious hope, was poured into the rotation.

A record $105 million for Kevin Brown and $15.5 million more for Carlos Perez.

With Brown at the front and Perez in the middle of a rotation that includes the developing Chan Ho Park, Ismael Valdes and Darren Dreifort, the Dodgers figured to have a chance to win every night.

Has it happened?

Not with consistency.

Will it?

Despite early disappointment, it is too soon to conclude that it won’t.

“With the exception of Brownie and Rocket [Valdes], it feels like the starting pitching has been awful,” pitching coach Charlie Hough said. “But then look at the overall numbers.

“We’re [a respectable] fifth or sixth in the league in [earned-run average] and we’re only a game out of first place. When you look at it that way, it’s not too bad.”

What doesn’t look too bad one way, though, may not be very pretty another.

Given the state of a bullpen that would have inspired Emma Lazarus, since it has been a refuge for some of baseball’s homeless and tempest-tossed, quantity innings are as important to the Dodgers as quality starts.

Said Hough: “For us to be successful, we need more innings from the starters. You can get by with one or two guys struggling. More than that puts too much stress on the bullpen.”

Enhanced significantly by Brown’s average of seven innings a start and 2.54 earned-run average, Dodger starters began a weekend series against St. Louis with respectable numbers--a cumulative ERA of 4.08 with an average of 6 2/3 innings a start.

But with Perez struggling, Park an enigma, Valdes battling a blister and Dreifort encumbered again by the shin splints that the Dodgers fear may be a career-long problem, the consistency has been missing--along, at times, with the innings.

Brown has delivered, setting a tenacious tone as expected. Valdes might have picked up the cue, but who else?

In an information age, the manager noted the other day, his young starters have been too analytical, too cute, shaking off too many signs.

One result: Dodger starters had given up 43 homers in 40 games through Thursday--31 by Park, Perez and Valdes in 144 2/3 innings.

“I’m an aggressive manager,” Johnson said. “Rock and fire.”

With Brian Bohanon 6-1 in Colorado, a suddenly cost-conscious Fox having urged the Dave Mlicki giveaway and the new management team inheriting a barren farm system, there is little insurance beyond Jamie Arnold, who came up big when Perez suffered his mysterious thigh injury in Montreal.

Perez pitched four consecutive complete games for the Dodgers last September, netting the three-year contract. Now, throwing only in the low 80s, he is 1-5 with a 6.63 ERA and Park is 3-5 with a 4.78 ERA in what was going to be a breakthrough season--and it still might be. It still might be if his seven-inning stint against Houston on Thursday night is an indication. He threw hard and gave up one run to the National League’s best hitting team, leaning on Brown for advice in the dugout but being himself on the mound.

The Dodgers suspect that the on-and-off contract talks have been a major distraction to Park, who carries the pride and hopes of his native Korea and who, perhaps, has been trying to compete with Brown rather than feed off his intensity.

“Chan Ho puts an awful lot of pressure on himself,” Hough said. “You have to remember this is still a young rotation. They’re still learning and adjusting, and I think a couple of them have been trying to do too much. I certainly wouldn’t panic. They’re all in pretty good health.”

In the National League West, only Arizona can match the Dodgers’ rotation depth, and now the Diamondbacks have lost Todd Stottleymre for at least four weeks because of a shoulder injury.

It is a division the Dodgers should win, if not dominate, but that’s a familiar story.

It is still a team that needs to execute, to prove that it doesn’t have to hit home runs to score, to stabilize the bullpen, to hope Shaw can hold up under a heavy workload--he has pitched more than an inning four times already and been brought into four games that were tied--and to play with a fire, so that there’s no mistaking the desire, attitude and chemistry.

For Johnson, however, neither makeup nor offense is the problem. The problem, he said, is that a team built on starting pitching hasn’t received the caliber that was expected. With 120 games to play it can still happen. It is an arms race for the Dodgers. It is that simple.