Ups and Downs : With His Pitching at Its Lowest Ebb, Gott Gets Lift From Unlikely Oracle’s Ramblings

Walking the beat on summer nights at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, security officer Robert Sarkisian has seen drunks and fights and people who would do anything to cool off. But he had never seen this.

It was nearly 1 a.m Saturday. The Dodgers and Atlanta Braves had spent more than six hours playing a doubleheader. The stands were empty.

Through the darkness, Sarkisian spotted a man jogging around the baseball field. The man wore pants, a T-shirt and what looked like an expression of despair.

He jogged about 20 laps. Sarkisian watched.

When the man stopped to stretch, Sarkisian approached him.

“What are you doing ?” Sarkisian asked.

“My name is Jim Gott,” the man said. “I pitch for the Dodgers.”

“Oh yeah?” Sarkisian said. “What is that like?”

“Well, it has its ups and downs,” Gott said.

“Oh yeah,” Sarkisian said. “Sort of like my job.”

For 15 minutes, Sarkisian talked and Gott listened. Sarkisian said he was a poet and a philosopher trapped in a security officer’s uniform.

He talked about not confusing a job with an identity. He talked about hard times building character. He even read Gott a poem about optimism.

It wasn’t until Sarkisian returned to security headquarters that somebody told him Gott was the guy who earlier Friday had walked Brave pitcher Kent Mercker with the bases loaded in the 10th inning, resulting in a Dodger loss.

“I can’t tell you how good it was to hear what that guard said,” Gott said. “He was almost like a vision. He helped give me strength to go on.”

And so, despite a professed desire to leap from his hotel window, Gott calmly took his spot in the bullpen at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium Tuesday for the first of a three-game series against the Padres.

He will try not to remember the worst game of his major league career. He will try to forget that he is on one of the worst stretches of his career.

He will pray that Manager Tom Lasorda gives him the ball.

“As bad as it is going, all it takes is one good inning, even one good batter, and I can break out of this,” Gott said. “Just one good batter, one good strike. . . .”

Suddenly, though, it is as if everyone has forgotten that Gott saved 34 games in a season for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Or that few pitched better during the Dodgers’ comeback last year.

Gott was 2-1 with an 0.56 earned-run average from July 1 to Sept. 2, helping him earn a $1.725-million contract that makes him the Dodgers’ highest-paid full-time relief pitcher.

But in three months, he has become their least-trusted.

Gott has blown two of three save opportunities. Since recording his only save, May 15 against the Montreal Expos, he has struggled:

--On May 19 against the New York Mets, he walked two batters in two-thirds of an inning, walking in a run.

--On May 21 against the Houston Astros, he walked the first three batters he faced and was removed.

--On June 1 against the Cincinnati Reds, he gave up Chris Sabo’s game-tying, two-run single two pitches after relieving Mike Morgan.

--On June 4 against the St. Louis Cardinals, Gott entered the game with a one-run lead in the 11th inning and gave up a single, a walk and a game-winning, two-run triple to Milt Thompson.

All of that led up to the horrors of Friday. In the first game of a doubleheader against the Braves, Gott gave up a game-tying single to Terry Pendleton in the ninth inning, then loaded the bases in the 10th on a walk, a balk, an intentional walk and an infield single.

With two out, Mercker was batting only because the Braves had run out of pinch-hitters.

Mercker, who had spent parts of two seasons with the Braves, had never reached base in the major leagues. In five at-bats, he hit the ball once, grounding out.

But after running the count full, Gott walked him, ending the game. Neither Gott nor Lasorda probably will have a worse moment this year.

Gott’s concentration was so awry that, after ball four, he stuck up his glove, as if to ask catcher Carlos Hernandez to return the ball for another pitch.

“I was so unfocused out there before that last pitch, I could see Mercker, I could see the umpire, I could see the guy in the camera well, I could see some people moving around behind home plate,” Gott recalled. “I could smell the popcorn. I could hear things being said in the upper deck. I could feel the grittiness of the dirt under my feet.”

Gott added, “I threw the pitch, and in a split second, I thought it felt good. I thought the ball was running. I thought the guy was going to swing . . . and then, ‘Ohhh, nooo.’ “

The question many asked was, considering that Mercker was not going to swing, why not just throw the ball across the plate?

Gott said that lately, nothing has been harder.

“Sure, the average person thinks, ‘Just throw it up there,’ but it’s not that easy,” Gott said. “You can’t throw batting practice fastballs to anybody in this league. I should know; I’ve been lucky enough to hit four home runs.

“So you have to put something on the ball, and you want to put it somewhere he can’t hit it. This is what I tried to do on my first few pitches to Mercker. Then when I realized he was just up there to stand, it was too late.”

Gott said he could have avoided the walk “by just stepping off the mound before that last pitch, taking a deep breath, looking up in the sky and thinking. But I had thrown a good strike on my previous pitch, and so I wanted to hurry up and do it again.”

His predicament was typical of his entire season, Gott said.

Now that his elbow is sound for the first season since 1988, his standout season with Pittsburgh, he has been trying hard to relive those heroics. And with Jay Howell out for at least a week with elbow problems, Gott is trying even harder.

“The first person I went up to in the clubhouse after walking Mercker was Jay Howell,” he said. “I said, ‘Buddy, I’m just trying too hard.’ I mean, this is the reason I am here, to back up Jay and fill his stopper role when he is out.

“I want to be that stopper. I want to do that job. I want it so much. . . .”

Fred Claire, the Dodger vice president who acquired the injured Gott in the winter of 1989, said his problem is obvious.

“He is fighting himself,” Claire said. “The team is going well. He wants to be a part of it, and he is feeling the pressure.

“The good thing about him is, he has the emotional strength to get back in there and turn it around. I really believe that.”

So does Gott, but he is not taking any chances. Though he is perhaps the strongest Dodger, he underwent that solitary workout after Friday’s games.

Then, four hours before Sunday night’s game, he spent an hour pitching in the bullpen under a scorching afternoon sun. Earlier this year, he warmed up for 20 minutes after a game.

Sweating and grunting, he has decided, beat thinking too much. He is returning to thinking like a power pitcher.

“I’m going to stop going just for corners, stop looking just at the outside of the plate,” Gott said. “That’s fine for Orel Hershiser, but not for me. I am a power pitcher, and I have to remember that.

“I have to bring my fastball right at hitters and have confidence in it because it moves so much. Bring it right down the middle. Let them try to hit it. Get them out the way I used to get them out.”

At least one person believes him.

“I told this Jim Gott, ‘I don’t think of myself as a security officer, I don’t care what anybody says,’ ” Sarkisian said from his Gate M post. “I told him, ‘I hope you just don’t think of yourself just as a pitcher.’ I told him to think of himself as a good person who can overcome whatever problems he has as a pitcher.

“Funny how I never knew he just had that bad game. It was like he was already believing that maybe next time, it won’t be so bad.”