He’s the Wild Card in the Angel Deck

He’d be the Rodney Dangerfield of major league baseball--except that, compared to him, Rodney Dangerfield would be the Rose Parade marshal.

He has been through more towns than the Mississippi River in his baseball career. He can’t seem to throw out the anchor in any of them.

He doesn’t even stay around long enough to get on a baseball card. Willie Mays was “Say, hey!” Rex Hudler is “Say who?” He’s got more luggage tags than a secretary of state. He hasn’t had a career, he’s had a tour--Oneonta, Fort Lauderdale, Greensboro, Nashville, Columbus, New York, Rochester, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Montreal, St. Louis, Tokyo with the Yakult Swallows, Anaheim.

Rex Allen Hudler, currently of the Angels, has been in so many rooming houses and hotels, he not only can’t remember the ZIP code, he sometimes can’t come up with the time zone. He’s baseball’s version of a hired gun. No one seems to need him long. Just urgently.

He’s probably, in a sense, overqualified. He can hit, run, catch, throw--and travel. Have bat, will travel. He has speed. He’s not a defensive liability. Wherever he had the at-bats, he had the production. He played 116 games in Columbus one season. And batted .292. He stole 30 bases in 91 games in Fort Lauderdale once. When he went to Japan in 1993 he not only batted .300, he hit 14 homers and his Swallows won the Japanese World Series. So they cut him.

The trouble is, he’s cursed with versatility. He’s the quintessential utility man. He can play seven positions. He’s too valuable to stick in one. And where the baseball records show, for instance, 92 games played, they mean parts of them. In 1989, when he ostensibly played 92 at Montreal, he got 155 at-bats. The year before, records showed he played in “only” 77 games--but got 216 at-bats. (He hit .273.)

He didn’t have to be a baseball player. He wanted to. He could have been in the NFL. He was a fast-enough high school wide receiver that he made prep All-American and 25 colleges were offering scholarships. He remembers a guided tour of Michigan State, where Kirk Gibson, no less, cautioned him against a baseball career. “It’s for sissies,” advised Gibson.

Hudler is no clubhouse lawyer. If anything, he has an excess of enthusiasm for the grand old game. He is known around the clubhouse as a guy who will go out for coffee for you. He’s a fan. When he got a cup of coffee with the San Francisco Giants once, he left, after being cut, with the awed remembrance that he had met Willie Mays. He’s a hero worshiper.

When he was with St. Louis, his manager there, Joe Torre, put the matter in perspective for him.

“Hud,” Torre told him, “you could be an everyday player, but you do too many things well. You’re like a wild card in a poker hand.”

Adds Hudler: “I’m like the 25th man. That’s my role. Last to come, first to go. It takes getting used to.”

You’re kind of like a plumber. You have to wait till the team springs a leak.

Because he’s always been hyper-energetic, Hudler chafes at inaction and has had to struggle to find the patience for his role.

“He brings a lot of energy to the ballclub,” concedes Angel Manager Marcel Lachemann. “He has had to control that energy, that enthusiasm--and he’s done very well with it this year. He’s been a role player, but when his role is starter, he’s ready.”

His figures are of starting-player quality. He is batting .317. He has 10 home runs. Only Jim Edmonds, Tim Salmon and Chili Davis had more--and each of them had almost twice as many at-bats. He has stolen eight bases, more than anyone else on the lead-footed Angels.

Does this mean the Angels are going to stick him on second base or out in center field and have him take dead aim on some of Babe Ruth’s records? Hardly. Hudler is not only a free spirit, he’s often a free agent. He leads the world in free agency. He has been a free agent in four states and two other countries, Canada and Japan.

The Angels are going good now. That’s bad news for Hudler. He’s like the auto club. He needs a breakdown some place to do his stuff.

But Sparky Anderson, no less, says that he’s the kind of guy baseball needs.

“The dugouts used to be full of guys like that,” Anderson laments. “They come to play.”

Hud would love to. Play, that is. But with almost 19 years in the game, he knows what the drill is: “Don’t call us--we’ll call you.”

But one time, he broke away from that ukase. That was when he was in the minor leagues in Florida and, on a trip through Tampa, he personally delivered a hand-written note to Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. “I told him I was ready to be promoted.”

It worked. So, did owner George send him up to play center field in Yankee Stadium in the middle of all those monuments? Don’t be silly. He sent him to Columbus.

Rodney Dangerfield would understand perfectly.