BATTLE THAT NEVER ENDS : Every Day, Welch Realizes, His Life Is Getting Better . . . in Every Way

By GORDON EDES

May 6, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Rick Sutcliffe, who was there when Bob Welch bared his soul, was there again the other day at batting practice, when Mike Scioscia snatched

Welch’s cap and bared the Dodger pitcher’s head.

Scioscia pointed to an area just below the crown of Welch’s skull, where the hair had retreated and left a bald spot in its wake.

Sutcliffe, with his full head of well coifed hair and bushy red beard, cackled with delight.

“It looks like somebody took a pitching wedge to it,” the Chicago Cub pitcher said.

Six years ago, when they still were Dodger teammates and had become best of friends, there were no bald spots for Sutcliffe to tease Welch about. But even though they were both young and apparently carefree, Sutcliffe saw Welch age beyond his years.

At 23, Welch had become an alcoholic.

That story, of course, is well known by now, told by Welch in compelling fashion in “Five O’Clock Comes Early,” a book he co-authored with George Vecsey, a sports columnist for the New York Times.

The book was released again this spring in a new paperback edition by the William Morrow & Co., probably to take advantage of the publicity that drug abuse in baseball has had in recent months.

Why would Welch, who has not had a drink since spending 36 days at the Meadows, an addiction treatment center in Wickenburg, Ariz., want to draw attention again to a problem that many would find embarrassing?

Sutcliffe understands. “I think it’s something he should take a lot of pride in,” Sutcliffe said. “The fact he was able to straighten things out.

“Look at him now, what he’s done. He’s one of the best pitchers in baseball, and in my mind, he’s a great person.

“You want to have a friend like that. I know if I ever needed anything, the man would go to war for me, and I’d go to war for him. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”

Welch must have known that the winter day in 1980 when he picked up the phone and asked Sutcliffe, and his wife, Robin, to come to the Meadows for “family week,” a chance for family and friends to confront the alcoholic with his problems--and are forced to look at their own.

“It took a lot of courage for him to call us,” Sutcliffe said. “I remember my wife and I getting off the plane with our golf clubs--hey, we were going to Arizona. Those golf clubs never got out of our hotel room.”

Many times before, Sutcliffe and Welch, drinking buddies that they were, had lifted a glass together. But this was the first time Sutcliffe told Welch how embarrassed and hurt he had been, sneaking vodka out of a shaving kit in a bathroom in Disneyland, covering up for Welch when he showed up drunk for a game in San Francisco and challenged Terry Whitfield, then of the Giants, to a fight.

On that day in the Meadows, Rick Sutcliffe cried. Bob Welch reached out, gave him a hug, and told Sutcliffe he was sorry.

“I get a lot of mail,” Sutcliffe said. “A lot of people have talked to me and told me that what Bob has gone through had helped them, whether it alcohol problem, drug problem, or personal problem. news

He’s helped them get through some tough times.”

Hanging above Bob Welch’s cubicle in the Dodger clubhouse is a snapshot of Welch and Whitfield, newly arrived as a Dodger, arms around each other.

“That’s the first thing he did when I came here,” Whitfield said. “He grabbed me and had that picture taken. And he apologized.”

Welch had a blackout after that incident in 1979, and it was only after Sutcliffe supplied details that he realized what had transpired.

“We talk about what happened all the time,” Welch said with a small smile. “He knew I was (bleep) faced, but it’s lucky Terry’s not that kind of guy (to fight). It’s funny that we’re now playing on the same team.”

When Welch wrote the book, his sober personality was just forming, he said. How does the Bob Welch of today differ from the Welch who said he perpetually had a buzz on, who said he loved getting drunk?

“I’m basically free from chemicals,” he said. “Everything else is about the same.

“But try not having a beer for a month. It’s not easy.”

It wasn’t easy the night before, either, when Welch was superb in shutting out the Cubs, 4-0, for his third win and second shutout of the season, clearly the best start of his career.

“I was excited and happy,” Welch said. “Then, boom, the thing popped in my mind: ‘It sure would be nice to have a few beers.’

“Luckily, I have a lot of people supporting me. I’m not out there by myself.”

Instead of having a beer that night, Welch went home and grabbed a book--his own. “I read another 110 pages,” he said. “It must have been 5 o’clock before I went to sleep.

“Ironic? No doubt about that.”

There is little doubt as well that Welch’s book, and the 20-minute documentary film prepared from the same material, have had an impact on others.

“Every day in my mailbox, somebody has sent a letter about that book,” Welch said. “It’s the kind of book that you can read but doesn’t get stuck on a shelf. You can pass it on.

“It’s the story of myself and my family. It offers some advice and answers some questions what you can do about (alcoholism).”

Bob is not the only member of the Welch family who has quit drinking. So have his brother, Donnie, and his cousins who grew up next door, Lloyd and Doug.

“All of us were abusive drinkers, every one of us,” Welch said. “We drank, and we could drink a lot.

“Those guys stopped on their own, probably because of what I’d done. They saw I could act just as goofy and have just as much fun.”

His mother, Lou-Nell, became an officer in her local Al-Anon chapter, for relatives and friends of alcoholics, and his father, Rubert, also cut down on his drinking.

“The greatest thing I’ve ever done for my mother was to quit drinking,” Welch said.

“One thing that concerned my mom more than anything else was that when I left home to go to college, she was afraid I would become an alcoholic somewhere down the road. You know how ma’s are. But she didn’t know what to say.”

Welch grew up in Hazel Park, Mich., a working-class suburb of Detroit.

“It’s a tough neighborhood, Hazel Park,” Welch wrote in his book. “People were raised to be tough. They’re great competitors in sports, and they’re the same way in life: chasing women, fighting in bars, drinking beer, playing pool.”

Welch saw the story in the papers the other day where John Van de Kamp, the California state attorney general, cited a survey showing that more than half of high school juniors had experimented with drugs and 85% had tried alcohol.

“Back in my neighborhood, it was worse than that,” Welch said.

Back in his neighborhood, Welch also met Mary Ellen Wilson, the woman he eventually married a month before spring training opened in 1984.

At first, Mary Ellen refused to believe that Welch was an alcoholic. “You don’t have an alcohol problem,” she told him when he first called to say he was checking into the Meadows. “You just drink too much.”

Welch said he never struck Mary Ellen during his drinking years, but the book relates some painful scenes of verbal humiliation.

“I wasn’t really abusive around her; she was partying along with me,” Welch said. “She was right there, just not to the extent that I was.

“In our neighborhood, everybody was doing it. All my friends, her friends, were in the same situation.”

But unlike Steve Howe, a former Dodger pitcher and Welch’s teammate who had a problem with drugs, Welch took responsibility for his problem. He didn’t blame it on the Dodgers, who steered him to the Meadows, or his neighborhood, and even though both of his parents felt at times that they were to blame, he didn’t pass it off on them, either.

“It was nobody’s fault but my own,” he said the other day.

Welch also read where LaMarr Hoyt, the San Diego Padre pitcher who entered an alcohol treatment center this spring, was quoted as saying that if he were an alcoholic, “then 590 of the other 650 players in baseball are alcoholics.”

Said Welch: “I don’t know the man, maybe he feels exactly that way. But sometimes when you come out of a center like that, you pop off and say something to take the eye away from you. ‘It gets it off me.’ I know I did.

“I’ve never hooked up with him to the point we sat down and talked. Sometimes, when you put yourself on somebody, they tend to run away. I’ll slam someone off in a minute if they do that to me, that’s the way I am.”

But for those who seek him out at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings he still attends, Welch said he is more than willing to help. At the same time, he is on the receiving end of a network of support that he could not live without.

It starts with his wife, Mary Ellen. “I’m lucky to be married to a woman who is my best friend,” Welch said.

“And we have a big family, a strong family, and a strong set of friends. I get a lot of support from a lot of special people.”

The world learned early, on an October night in 1978 when 21-year-old Bob Welch struck out Reggie Jackson in a memorable World Series confrontation, that this tall, lean right-hander could be something special.

Ever since, the Dodgers have predicted that Welch one day would be a 20-game winner, their first since Tommy John won 20 in 1977. Now that he has added a split-fingered fastball, which helped him post a 14-4 record in 1985 even though he missed the first two months of the season, the Dodgers figure it’s just a matter of time.

So does Sutcliffe, the 1984 Cy Young Award winner in the National League.

“He could always pitch,” Sutcliffe said. “The split-finger just adds another dimension.

“He’s one of the few guys who can go out with just a fastball and win, because he has such great location and velocity.

“And his knowledge of pitching is so much greater. When he first got here, he just blew people away. Now he can get people out when he doesn’t have the good heater.”

In his book, Welch said his whole personality was based on being a star. And now?

“Sure,” he said. “A star in the eyes of myself. A star by being sober. That’s the biggest kind.

“I’m a kid. I love to play this game. I’m an adult, but I have a ton of kid in me.

“I love to come out here and shag fly balls and all that stuff. I honestly enjoy playing the game every day.

“I don’t look at it as being a star. I look at it as something I always dreamed of doing and I was blessed to be able to do it. When I go back to the neighborhood, they don’t treat me like a star. They don’t treat any different than when I was a high school kid, throwing up hoops.”

After what he’s been through, Welch said, on-field setbacks--such as the elbow injury that seemingly jeopardized his career last season--don’t seem quite as overwhelming.

“Sure, I wanted to hurry up the process (last season), but I’ve learned that the only thing you can do is let tomorrow take care of itself. You never know what’s going to happen.

“I come from a background where I didn’t have too much to start with, and I’ll never forget that. My wife’s the same way.

“I’m not fearful about anything in my life, and I’m lucky I don’t have to go through it by myself.

“And it’s even getting better as time gets on.”