WITH ANY luck, Rob McElhenney will bring the sunshine with him.

The West Coast-based creator and star of FX's "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" said yesterday that he's "flying in on Saturday" for Game 3 of the World Series and that "I'll be there for all three games" in his hometown.

His prediction: "Phillies in five."

"I'll take Phillies in six," he conceded, "but I just don't want to watch it on TV. I'd rather be there."

Phillies fans might prefer to have the St. Joe's Prep grad in the house, too, since he seems to be on a winning streak.

Not only is FX happy with the Season 5 ratings for his PC-free comedy about friends who own a bar in Philly - of the 1.8 million who tune in on average each week, up 37 percent from last year, 1.1 million are under 35 - but the show's reruns will start running in syndication next year on Comedy Central.

Plus, McElhenney recently got to meet and work with one of his childhood heroes, a "classic villain."

That would be Rowdy Roddy Piper, who guest-stars tomorrow night in an episode that finds the "Sunny" gang - McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day and Danny DeVito - involved in mounting a wrestling show for returning troops.

Piper "was a huge star in the late '80s and early '90s. He was like the classic villain. I always loved him and he was always a really great, amazing wrestler, and I was a huge fan of wrestling as a kid," McElhenney said.

"We wanted to figure out a way that we could get into the world of wrestling in some way, shape or form, and we wrote this character and we were trying to figure out do we want like a really great actor or do we want a wrestler. And then the name of Roddy came up and he made absolutely sense because he's both," he said, noting that Piper starred in "a John Carpenter film in the late '80s called 'They Live,' which was like a classic."

When I suggested that the over-the-top world of wrestling seems like such a perfect fit for "Sunny" that the only surprise is that the show didn't go there until Season 5, McElhenney laughed.

"I appreciate your saying that, because I feel like we've been talking about that for a while in the writers room" and there were fears that "maybe it's too broad," he said.

Maybe it's too broad? For this show?

"Absolutely. I guess it depends on your aesthetic. But our feeling is that the show can kind of go back and forth. We feel like it fluctuates between, you know, very simple and very small and then very broad," he said.

"We want to do a little bit of both," he said. "We have an episode coming up in two weeks that's very small. It's just about how Dennis [Howerton] and I decide to take a break. We break up with each other, essentially. We move out of each other's apartments. It's very simple story, much in the vein of 'Kramer vs. Kramer,' where we kind of like fight over Charlie.

"The truth is that fans respond differently to different episodes, and that'll be some people's favorite episode and some people [will] hate it," he said.

It's also the kind of episode, McElhenney acknowledged, that's easier to do in a fifth season than it might have been earlier. (Back in 2005, the show's first seven-episode season managed to deal with race, abortion, cancer, death, gun control, underage drinking and child molestation.)

"I was just having this conversation with Larry Charles yesterday" about the producer's stint as a writer on "Mad About You," he said.

"I was saying I was not a demographic for that show at all - I was a teenager in high school - and yet every time I watched it I really liked it. And one of my favorite episodes was one that wasn't funny at all. It was when they break up. And he said that he wrote that episode . . . I remember really enjoying it. And he was saying like it took a long time for us to get that episode to work because you have to earn it."

"It's Always Sunny" has already earned enough trust from FX that it's essentially been renewed for two more seasons, after which, "we'll see," McElhenney said. "If people keep watching it, we'll keep making it." *

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