WALLY WHIRLED

Wally Joyner is all grown up. He is 39 years old and has not come back to Anaheim to reinstall Wally World on our hard drive.

He will be reintroduced as an Angel tonight, when the team makes its 2001 home debut at Edison Field. For the first time since 1991, one of the all-time Angel fan favorites will dress in the home clubhouse again.

Joyner doesn’t expect to start. He’s been the starting first baseman only once in six games so far. But in that start, he hit a home run and scored twice.

So it’s not 1986. Joyner is not a 22-year-old wide-eyed innocent hitting home runs and driving in runs and generally playing as if his Hall of Fame induction invitation is in the mail.

It is 2001 and his oldest daughter is 17 and being recruited by top colleges to play soccer. His wife, Lesley, is an accomplished horsewoman who has jumpers and a quarter horse she might run at Los Alamitos this summer.

Joyner’s head is bald--shaved partly to hide what wouldn’t be there--and his eyes are wise. But mostly what you see and hear when he sits down in the dugout to talk about past, present and future is a man happy with himself, his family, his game and his decision.

But first some history.

You remember Wally World, right?

You remember how a rosy-cheeked, towheaded rookie--the clean-living young Mormon with the sweet wife and two daughters--dropped into Disneyland territory as if created on the drawing boards of Walt himself.

You remember how Joyner cracked home runs and smiles with equal ease and led the Angels into the playoffs. You remember how that lowbrow, high hilarity Chevy Chase movie “Vacation” was new and trendy. You remember the last part, when the Griswold family completes a cross-country summer trip from hell to reach “Wally World,” the amusement park dedicated to a talking moose. And how, when the Griswolds finally arrive, Wally World is closed?

“The whole thing was kind of a dream, a little serendipity,” Joyner says.

He is talking about 1986, about Wally World, about how he hit .290 with 22 home runs and 100 runs batted in. He is talking about how he had 15 home runs in his first 36 games as a major leaguer. He is talking about how, out of nowhere, some fans in center field one day held up a sign which read, “Wally World,” and how everybody played along.

“It was great,” he says.

“It was hard,” Lesley says.

Instant heroes become absentee husbands and fathers. What Wally remembers about 1986 were the high times. What Lesley remembers were the hard times, the times when her husband was too tired from the demands, from the baseball and from the fans who wanted to meet the new star and from the media who wanted to talk to him and from agents and deal makers and all the people who wanted to be part of Wally World.

“To be honest,” Lesley says, “I was happy when it all died down.”

And Wally World wasn’t all glamour. There was a midseason slump and there was, once the Angels were in the playoffs against the Boston Red Sox, a leg infection that put Joyner in the hospital and helped put the Angels out of the playoffs.

His second season also was fabulous. He hit .285, had 34 home runs and 117 RBIs. There were no playoffs, though, and even by his second season Joyner was having trouble with the front office. At the same time Gene and Jackie Autry were deciding that spending without regard on players such as Reggie Jackson wasn’t working, Joyner was feeling underappreciated.

Never again did he hit so many home runs for the Angels and, in fact, he thinks he may have cursed himself.

“I was a line drive hitter,” he says. “But I created some expectations, both for myself and the fans, that maybe weren’t realistic.”

In 1991, he batted .301 and had 26 homers. He was still beloved by fans, a good citizen, a family man who lived honorably and who wanted to be an Angel.

But he also felt disrespected by the Angels. He singled out Jackie Autry as focusing too much on cost-cutting and not enough on appreciating him. With tears in his eyes, he accepted a one-year, $4 million deal with the Kansas City Royals. He was 29 years old and maybe a little naive.

“I still didn’t understand that what I was in was a business,” he says. “I took things that were business too personally.”

After six seasons with the Angels, he spent four with Kansas City and parts of another four with the San Diego Padres and then finally, last year, a single, unsatisfactory year with the Atlanta Braves.

How Joyner has become an Angel again, we all know. Mo Vaughn had sudden, unexpected surgery on his biceps and will miss the season. The Angels needed a first baseman. Joyner needed to postpone his retirement for a year.

And Joyner was going to be retired. He did not enjoy being a little-used backup to Andres Galarraga in Atlanta last season. But he is still a competitive athlete who truly believes that he is still a player.

“I think I can still start in this league,” Joyner said in Texas on Day 2 of this, his final season. “And I wanted to be an Angel again.”

He is not too proud to say he made the call to Anaheim when Vaughn had surgery. He is not too proud to say it is possible that today, tomorrow, next week, the Angels will say goodbye. He is not too proud to say that today, tomorrow, next week, he might say goodbye.

“If I’m not contributing, I don’t want to stay,” he says, “and I hope I won’t have to be told that. I hope I know.”

The whole idea of retirement, though, is scary.

“Neither of us was positive it was the right time to quit,” Lesley says.

She is speaking from the family home in Mapleton, Utah. It is where she, Jessica, 17; McKenzie, 16; Crosby, 12; and Chase, 10; live with 14 horses and lots of land.

Lesley is still breathlessly excited that her first racing horse, Memo, won his first quarter horse race Saturday. Lesley speaks in paragraphs, not sentences. The words race each other, as fast as Memo.

She remembers how she and Wally stayed at the Jolly Roger Inn when Wally joined the Angels in 1986. She remembers the first two years here as a blur, of learning how to be the wife of a star, of learning to be a mother and a baseball wife, of establishing a home in Yorba Linda, of meeting her best friend, still her best friend, and the woman who introduced her to horses.

Lesley came back to Anaheim last week when the Angels played exhibition games at Edison Field. No Jolly Roger now. Wally and Lesley stayed at the Doubletree.

“When we drove to the stadium,” she says, “I couldn’t believe it. Parking attendants remembered us. One man remembered seeing me on a golf course. They remembered our daughters. It is a little like coming home.”

Wally’s memories are more of unfinished business. What if, Wally is asked, Wally World came back? What if he sparked another playoff run for the Angels? What if the guys in center field dusted off those Wally World signs?

“It’s silly, but it would be great, wouldn’t it?” Joyner says. “I think if you are an Angel from that era, you feel like there’s unfinished business. When I sat down and talked to my family about coming here this summer, it was unanimous. There is no other place I’d be doing this. I’d be retired.

“And now I get this great gift. I get to come back home and have a second chance. For that, I feel blessed.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com