McSorley Is More Than Mere Enforcer : Kings: His ability to play both defense and right wing has been a key to the team’s success without Gretzky.

Marty McSorley, baby-sitter?

Tomas Sandstrom, the new father, is talking in the dressing room after practice about the joys of changing diapers. He casts a sly glance at McSorley, the Kings’ consummate bachelor.

“Maybe I’ll even bring a diaper in here,” Sandstrom says. “You can see what one looks like. That will probably be the only time you ever see one.”

McSorley laughs. As always, he has a response. In his junior days, McSorley roomed with a family in Ontario. Once, he offered to baby-sit for their youngster.

“When he acted up, I said: ‘I’m going to hang you by your belt from the doorknob until you’re good,’ ” McSorley said. “And it worked.”

Sandstrom listened. Presumably, this won’t be his technique with young Kevin Tomas Sandstrom.

McSorley is the enforcer on and off the ice, not Sandstrom. He will do whatever it takes: fight the toughest players in the league, move back and forth between defense and right wing, stake out controversial positions as the Kings’ players representative.

His change from an afterthought in the Wayne Gretzky deal to one of the Kings’ essential players has been little short of incredible. No longer is he a one-dimensional, single-purpose player who keeps his place in the NHL simply by fighting.

McSorley kills penalties, plays on the power play and sometimes switches positions in the middle of the game.

“The way he’s gotten this far is by hard work,” Gretzky said. “I don’t think that there’s anyone in the league who can play the right side and can play defense as effectively as he does. Mark Howe did it, but he has a different style.”

In 35 games, McSorley has eight goals, 19 points and 210 penalty minutes. And he still fights. He has fought the New York Islanders’ Ken Baumgartner, Detroit’s Bob Probert, Vancouver’s Gino Odjick and Chicago’s Stu Grimson twice.

Then there were his two bouts with the Oilers’ Louie DeBrusk. The first was in Edmonton on Nov. 14, only five seconds into the game. The Kings won and McSorley scored. Later, again in Edmonton, DeBrusk and McSorley dropped the gloves four seconds into the game on Dec. 18.

If you like hockey fights, the second one was a classic. McSorley and DeBrusk fought for three or four minutes, and the linesmen let them slug to the point of exhaustion.

The crowd at the Northlands Coliseum turned against the former Oiler hero, McSorley, chanting DeBrusk’s name: “Louie! Louie!”

Said DeBrusk: “He was one of the guys I respected when I was growing up, the way he fought his way to respectability and the way he made himself a good player.”

Edmonton General Manager Glen Sather never wanted to give him up in the Gretzky trade in 1988. He had acquired McSorley from Pittsburgh in 1985 and believed in him right away, putting McSorley on a line with Mark Messier and Glenn Anderson.

Now Sather looks at his former protege a bit differently.

“He loves the role of the villain,” Sather said.

But not enough to talk about his fights. McSorley has never bragged.

“That side of my game, I go out and readily do it,” he said. “(But) I’d rather be known for being a good hockey player. I never watch fight films. People come up to me and they want to talk about fights or whatever. I don’t like to do that. I really avoid those conversations.”

In a sense, McSorley, 29, epitomizes the new-look Kings. Without Gretzky’s finesse and skill, they have adapted to Coach Barry Melrose’s hard-hitting, physical style. Working-class hockey, if you will.

It’s almost hard to believe that McSorley and his work ethic were almost someplace else at the start of the season. The Kings spent the off-season hoping to trade him.

And when Gretzky got hurt, the Kings needed a center and went shopping in the Norris Division, talking trade with the Detroit Red Wings. The Red Wings’ price was too high for Melrose. Otherwise, McSorley would be Probert’s teammate.

“At the start of the season, I didn’t want to move him,” Melrose said. “I wanted the chance to see him. He’s everything I preach, everything I believe in. Marty McSorley is the perfect player to fit what I believe in. A tough guy who can play.

“We just didn’t know if we had enough at center. I’m very glad it didn’t happen. The (Mike) Donnellys, (Tony) Granatos and Gretzkys don’t play unless you have people like McSorley and Brent Thompson behind them.

“You can’t have 20 Wayne Gretzkys. You just need one. Those guys have to be able to play. And the Marty McSorleys of the world let them play.”

There is a fine line between protection and aggression. Now, an extended absence by McSorley can cost the Kings. He has sat out one game because he incurred two stick-related major penalties. In October, he was suspended for non-game days by NHL President Gil Stein for cross-checking Boston’s Darren Banks.

With the Kings’ numerous injuries, they need McSorley in the lineup as much as possible.

“It’s got to the point where he’s too good a hockey player,” Melrose said. “He still has to do it for us, but he can’t do it on another person’s terms. It has to be when Marty wants to go. And it has to be for the team. Marty is too valuable to us for Louie DeBrusk to take off the ice any time he wants or (Ronnie) Stern or somebody else.”

The first time Melrose saw McSorley play was Melrose’s last season as a player. He was a player-coach with Adirondack in the American Hockey League and McSorley was with Pittsburgh’s minor league team in Baltimore.

“I knew it was time to get out,” Melrose said, laughing. “I didn’t want to play against this guy.”

McSorley’s competitiveness grew out of necessity. He is the fourth of seven boys and fifth of 10 children. His playgrounds were the ponds on 700 acres of farmland in Cayuga, Ontario.

Pond hockey was a mini-war in the McSorley household.

“There was a lot of time the game never quite finished,” he said. “We’d usually play until 10 (goals). If somebody got to nine, we found a way to start a scrap or start something to keep the game from finishing. It was competitive.

“We didn’t have a lot, but what we did have was special. We had each other. We went for it every time we could play. We used to finish our chores on the farm as fast as we could--just to get in a half an hour of ball hockey before it got dark and we had trouble seeing.”

McSorley hasn’t changed much. When he realized it was almost time for practice, he looked alarmed. He didn’t want to be late getting on the ice.

McSorley still wants to play hockey before it gets dark--as though the lights are about to be turned out any minute.