COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Irene Hodges has been working on her speech — and even sleeping with it, she jokes — since January, weeks after her family finally got the call they’ve been waiting on for more than five decades.

Irene’s father, Gil Hodges, the longtime Brooklyn Dodgers great and the manager of the Mets’ 1969 World Series championship team, will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday, more than 50 years after his death in 1972.

“I’ve been sleeping with my speech on my bed. I also have a copy in my car and a copy downstairs. So I’ve been working on it just about constantly,” Irene Hodges told The Post. “When you try to make everything so good and so right, it’s so hard.

“I’ve never given a speech for him before. Certainly not of this magnitude. I just wanted it to be from me and from my family. It’s exciting.”

Irene has been joined upstate this weekend by her brother Gil Hodges Jr., her sister Cindy and various other family members. Hodges’ widow, 95-year-old Joan Hodges, however, will be unable to attend.

“I have taken care of my mother for the last 2 ¹/₂ years, and I’m giving the speech since she couldn’t do it,” Irene Hodges said. “Before I left, I said, ‘All right, I’m leaving, I’ll see you on Monday. Remember this is all for Daddy.’ ”

Her mother’s response? “Tell him I said hi,” Irene Hodges recounted.

Irene Hodges’ speech surely will cover the remarkable, if too brief, life and career of her father, a Marine and Bronze Star recipient during World War II and a staple of World Series winners with the Dodgers both in Brooklyn (1955) and Los Angeles (1959) during an 18-year playing career.

The eight-time All-Star earned a third ring as manager of the Miracle Mets in 1969, before dying of a heart attack at 47 years old late in spring training on April 2, 1972.

“I’m so happy that he’s going into the Hall of Fame. I look at him as an American hero, and I think we’re so lacking for American heroes lately, that it’s apropos that this is happening,” former Mets outfielder Art Shamsky said at a recent appearance honoring Hodges on Long Island. “It’s going to be such a wonderful weekend. … Gil’s finally getting what he deserved, and you can look at the Hall of Fame and the reasons why he didn’t make it in until now.

“The Hall of Fame is so subjective, but I think the bottom line is we are all so happy about this.”

Indeed, the longstanding debate about Hodges’ candidacy has raged for decades, and especially since he garnered 63.4 percent (shy of the 75 percent necessary for induction) in his 15th and final year on the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot in 1983.

Hodges also fell short on numerous appearances to be voted in by the various Veterans Committees before the family received the call in December that he was designated for inclusion by the Golden Era Committee. He will be inducted along with BBWAA electee David Ortiz, fellow Golden Era selections Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva and Minnie Minoso, and former Negro Leagues stars Buck O’Neil and Bud Fowler.

To represent Hodges and the Mets, Shamsky will be joined at Sunday’s ceremony by former teammates Ed Kranepool, Cleon Jones and Ron Swoboda, as well as Sarah Seaver Zaske, the daughter of late Mets legend Tom Seaver.

Hodges, whose number 14 was retired by the Mets in 1973, also will become the eighth member of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers elected to the Hall — joining Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, manager Walter Alston, and pitchers Sandy Koufax and Tommy Lasorda (who was inducted as a manager in 1997). Robinson once called Hodges “the core of the Brooklyn Dodgers,” and now he finally will join his teammates in Cooperstown.

“I remember asking my dad once, ‘Daddy, do you think you’ll ever make the Hall of Fame?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never,’ ” Irene Hodges recalled. “I asked him, ‘Why do you say that?’

“He said, ‘Those are all great players in there. I’m not even close.’ I wanted to tell him, ‘Hey, you were a great player, too.’ And now I can.”