Whistle While He Works

“So, is everybody back there freaking out?”

Todd Hundley smiles. It is the infectious smile of a 9-year-old. You want to believe in that smile.

Yes, I say. All of us back there are all freaking out.

We worry he might not be ready to play consistently April 5, which means the Dodgers will not be ready April 5.

We fret that his surgically repaired right elbow will turn him into a two-day-a-week catcher, which will turn the Dodgers into another two-games-behind team.

We think feisty General Manager Kevin Malone could be on the hot seat even before he sits down.

Hundley smiles again.

“Tell everybody one thing,” he says. “Do . . . not . . . push . . . the . . . panic . . . button.”

He says each word so slowly, so powerfully, they feel like little home runs. You want to believe in those words.

Any day now, we will begin to find out whether we should.

On Friday at the latest, Hundley is expected to play in his first game as a Dodger after being sidelined for the first month of spring training because of elbow irritation.

The good thing is, he already may be the toughest guy on the team, arriving early, staying late, growling at the pain.

The scary thing is, his reconstructive surgery was named after its first beneficiary, Tommy John.

Last we looked, Tommy John was not a catcher.

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Todd Hundley not only wears his heart on his sleeve, he has it tattooed into his shoulder. There he displays four feathers, in honor of the 30% of his blood that he says is Oneida Indian.

One colorful feather for his wife. Two colorful feathers for his first two children.

And the fourth, white feather?

“For death,” he says, smiling again. “Something we all got in common.”

We don’t really know him yet, but there is the sense that he accepts this stuff, deals with it.

His mother is battling breast cancer.

“I’m right there for her,” he says.

One of his best friends died this winter at 33, of spinal meningitis, just like that, a guy named Red.

“Hard to believe, but now I’ve seen it happen,” he says.

He deals with this stuff. You get the sense that an elbow injury can’t kill him, it can only make him stronger.

“This is going to work, man,” he says. “I’m going to be fine.”

He makes us want to believe him.

But we have no idea. Nobody does. Not even Todd Hundley, one suspects.

Catchers usually don’t have this injury, so there are no celebrated cases of catchers coming back from it.

This doesn’t mean he can’t.

The only thing certain is that, unlike the many pitchers who have been made stronger by the surgery, Hundley cannot change his delivery.

He cannot plan his delivery and avoid snap throws.

He cannot work with a pitch count.

If he’s sound, he will play. If he’s not, there are no shortcuts.

The important thing is not that he start opening day against the Arizona Diamondbacks, which he probably will.

The important thing is that he can play five or six days in a row without pain, take a day off, then play five or six more.

Kevin Malone staked his first impressions here that Hundley can. He traded the league’s best defensive catcher, Charles Johnson, and outfield prospect Roger Cedeno for Hundley and a prospect last winter.

We cut the trade some slack then. The reports looked good. Hundley hit 41 homers and caught 153 games just two years earlier. It seemed worth the risk.

But risks look better in December than they do in April. Implicit in the trade was a promise that once the season started, the risk would be gone.

So far, that is a promise in limbo. That slack is slowly disappearing. The questions faced by Malone could one day be the sort faced by Fred Claire about Pedro Martinez and John Wetteland.

Not to mention questions about Hundley’s potential replacement, a prospect named Paul LoDuca.

When Hundley finally plays, it will not be a day too soon.

“If the season opened today, he could play today,” Malone says. “We have time. He’ll be fine.”

Nope. He doesn’t know either.

The reason Hundley has not yet played has nothing to do with the surgery, and everything to do with the surgery.

During one of his extra hitting sessions a couple of weeks ago--45 minutes that most guys wouldn’t do--Hundley swung too much and irritated the top part of his elbow.

The surgery was on the bottom part of his elbow, so the irritation probably occurred because of some sort of overcompensation.

Showing up for camp one month early, working out at least five hours a day, even working Tuesday on the team’s only day off this spring, Hundley is the king of overcompensation.

“I would find a sandlot somewhere if I could,” he says, and you believe him. “That is going to be the hardest part for me. Slowing down.”

The irritation certainly took care of that.

The morning after his extra batting practice, he felt a throbbing. He hurried to the ballpark and ran outside to throw.

And his knees knocked.

“The pain was so much, I nearly jelly-legged,” he says. “Everything was going great, then it blew up on me.”

He says he has since put it back together.

“Did you see me throw today?” he asks Tuesday.

Yes, and it was impressive. He consistently threw the ball 120 feet into a glove and the smack resounded around Dodgertown.

But will that throbbing return? Can he stay strong?

Randy Hundley, a former catcher and Todd’s father, says, “That’s his biggest thing, overcoming the fear that the elbow will break down again.”

His, and ours.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com

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