Dodgers Feel Relieved by Beating Braves at Last : Dodgers: Reed gets a second chance after balk and gets the winning hit in 10th. Hershiser, Maddux battle to a draw.

ATLANTA —  It was battle between the reigning Cy Young Award winner and a pitcher who once threw 59 consecutive scoreless innings on his way to winning a Cy Young and a World Series.

A sellout crowd of 49,187 at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium saw the Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser and the Braves’ Greg Maddux pitch brilliantly for nine innings Saturday night. But in the end, it was what second-base umpire Tom Hallion saw that made the difference in a 2-1 Dodger victory. And he saw a balk.

With one out in the 10th inning, Tom Goodwin on first base and the score tied, 1-1, Hallion called a balk on Brave reliever Jay Howell while Jody Reed was grounding out to first base.

Reed, awarded a second chance, hit a bloop single to short center and Goodwin, who had been awarded second base, scored the winning run. Goodwin was running for Mike Piazza, who had singled.

“What was different about (the balk) was that it was a lot quicker than any of the other pickoff attempts or other pitches that Jay had made,” Reed said. “You can’t just change your rhythm like that or someone is going to recognize it. And obviously they did.”

Reed saw Hallion motion during the pitch. “As an umpire, you don’t make these things up,” Hallion said. “(Howell) just went right through.”

Third base umpire Jim Quick put it this way: “The guy didn’t stop.”

Even Francisco Cabrera, the Braves’ playoff hero, couldn’t pull this game out for his team. Jim Gott, who relieved Hershiser, retired Cabrera and the two batters before him in the 10th inning to earn the save.

“We needed that one real bad,” Manager Tom Lasorda said after the Dodgers came back from two losses to the Braves.

What the Dodgers really need is to start hitting, but neither team did much of that with Hershiser and Maddux on the mound, except for Hershiser and Maddux, who got hits off each other.

Hershiser (1-1) retired the side in order in six of eight innings and took a two-hit shutout into the ninth inning. He had good command of his breaking ball and his sinker, and looked as close to the pitcher he used to be before shoulder surgery in 1990.

“I could have gone back out there in the 10th, but by then I had thrown 122 pitches and that was enough,” Hershiser said. “We don’t need to put up Fernando (Valenzuela) numbers.

“The third inning was kind of a hump inning for me, even though I got outs, I saw some negative results, and that kind-of helped me to bear down.”

The Dodgers managed five hits in Maddux’s nine innings, but only one would pay off. Tim Wallach led off the second inning with a line drive to right field that bounced past David Justice and was ruled a triple. He scored on a groundout by Eric Karros.

Maddux (1-1) struck out six.

“He’s just as tough as he was last year, and Orel is better than he was last year,” Brett Butler said.

Hershiser has spent the past two seasons coming back from his surgery, but from the beginning of spring it was clear that he had completed his comeback. He no longer needs to think about his shoulder; instead, he thinks about his pitches.

“I had pretty good stuff in spring training this year and had made another big stride from the comeback,” Hershiser said. “And I felt like an outing like this would be possible down the road, but didn’t know it would come this soon.

“That’s how I felt in the ninth inning when I was about to lose the game. I thought, ‘Hey, you are throwing the ball great and you’ve got good stuff, there’s no pressure here, you’re fortunate to be standing on the mound again.’ ”

Hershiser’s shutout unraveled in the ninth inning.

He walked pinch-hitter Ron Gant, his first base on balls. Gant went to second on a sacrifice by Otis Nixon. Then came Deion Sanders, who has the best batting average (.375) against Hershiser among the Braves. Sanders hit a double to right-center field that Darryl Strawberry played off the wall. He relayed to Reed, who made a perfect throw to get Sanders at third base, but Gant had scored to tie the game.

The relay proved crucial, because the next batter, Terry Pendleton, hit a line drive that hit the bottom of the wall in right-center. Butler had the ball bounce over his head, and Strawberry, trying to pick it up, booted it to put the winning run on third base.

Hershiser pitched around the next two batters, issuing intentional walks to Justice and Sid Bream to load the bases. He had an 0-and-2 count on Damon Berryhill when he started to falter. The next two pitches were balls, with the last looking like a softball pitch.

But there was nobody up in the bullpen. And Berryhill went down swinging on the next pitch.