Issue date: July 28, 1997
Fifteen years to the day on which he played his first major
league game, San Diego Padres outfielder Tony Gwynn hunches over
a small monitor propped up on a battered blue steamer trunk in
the visitor's clubhouse of Miami's Pro Player Stadium, studying
a video of his batting stroke—the sweetest swing since Glenn
Miller's. Land softly on the front foot ... cock the top hand
slightly toward the pitcher ... stay back ... pow! The
checkpoints are as constant as the engraved notches on a
dipstick. Gwynn, having had one hit in five at bats the previous
night against the Florida Marlins, is half a quart low. "I'll
fix it," the master mechanic says. The checkup is unremarkable
except for this: 2,037 games after his debut he was at work last
Saturday more than six hours before game time, well ahead of
coaches, rookies and vendors.
Padre Time marches on. The lefthanded hitting Gwynn is better
than ever, a stunning development for someone who has batted
against pitchers born during World War II; has undergone three
operations on his left knee and one for a partially torn right
Achilles tendon; has carried too much weight, as much as 220
pounds, on his 5'11" frame; and, at 37, is older than Don
Mattingly, who is already two years into retirement. Yet here he
is threatening to put up numbers for 1997 that would be as round
as the shadow he casts: 250 hits, 100 runs batted in, 20 home
runs and a .400 batting average, the magical figure not reached
in the 56 years since Ted Williams batted .406.
"It's the kind of year that I've dreamed about my whole career,"
Gwynn says. "It says people have to give me credit for my work
ethic, even though I don't look like I have much of one. It says
what I've been doing the last few years has paid off."
San Diego signed Gwynn in spring training to an extension that
will pay him an average of $4.2 million a season through 2000,
when he turns 40. "I'll play past that," he says. Adds Padres
president and CEO Larry Lucchino, "It reminds me of what they
said about General Grant's drinking: 'Give me generals who all
drink the same thing.' Well, I'll take players with the same
diet as Tony's."
With a .388 average at week's end, Gwynn seems certain not only
to improve his career average for a fifth straight season,
raising it from .329 to .339 over that span, but also to extend
the best run of hitting the game has seen by someone at such an
advanced age. Gwynn has batted .371 over the past five years,
beginning with 1993 when he turned 33. Only five players—and
none since '31—have had a better five-year average, and all
five, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, George Sisler, Harry Heilmann and
Al Simmons, began their runs in their 20s.
None of those Hall of Famers from before the era of expansion
and of specialized relief pitching endured the grind Gwynn did
last week. Beginning on July 13, Gwynn played six games in six
days in four time zones against four teams in which he faced 16
pitchers in 28 plate appearances. That is why comparing hitters
from different eras is a waste of time. A hitter is more
accurately measured against his peers, those players hitting
under the same conditions. By that yardstick—batting average
measured against contemporaries—Gwynn is the best hitter since
Williams and the sixth best hitter of all time . He
has batted .0789 better than all other major leaguers combined
during his career, a margin exceeded among players with 2,500
hits by only Cobb (.1029 better than his peers), Williams
(.0841), Hornsby (.0810), Nap Lajoie (.0806) and Willie Keeler
(.0794).
"O.K., that idea makes sense," Gwynn says, "but I don't care
what the numbers say. Am I better than Hank Aaron? Stan Musial?
Frank Robinson? Not a chance. The only thing I want people to
say about me is that I played the game the way it should be
played. What I've always wanted to do is be a complete player.
This is as close as I've ever come to it."
Until this season only Rod Carew and The Village Voice personals
were more associated with singles than Gwynn. But with 64 games
remaining at week's end, Gwynn already had smoked 15 home runs
(a career high), driven in 84 runs (six shy of his personal
best, thanks largely to an astounding .500 batting average with
runners in scoring position) and bashed 44 extra-base hits (a
dozen short of his single-season best). The same man who was
outhomered by Alvaro Espinoza last year is outslugging Fred
McGriff this year. Says Padres hitting coach Merv Rettenmund,
"I've never seen him turn on as many pitches as I've seen this
year. He hits so many balls to rightfield now that teams have to
play him straight up. They can't shift to leftfield, which is
where most of his hits used to go."
The change began with a conversation he had with Williams before
last season. "We talked for two hours," Gwynn says, "and we must
have spent 50 minutes talking about the inside pitch." Gwynn
already had won six of his seven National League batting titles,
including the crown for the strike-shortened 1994 season that he
got with a .394 average, and amassed Hall of Fame credentials by
allowing the inside pitch to get to the plate before, as he
likes to say, "carving" the ball through the hole between third
base and shortstop. Williams insisted that a good hitter meets
the inside pitch in front of the plate. He picked up his cane,
snapped at an imaginary inside fastball and shouted at Gwynn,
"You've got to turn on it! You've got to let it go! Let it go!"
Gwynn never applied the advice last year. He injured his right
heel in the 13th game of the season and could not plant firmly
enough on that foot to take an aggressive swing at the ball. He
won another batting title, hitting .353, but he did so with only
three home runs and 50 RBIs. After the season doctors removed
the bursa sac from his heel and repaired the Achilles tendon,
which had suffered a 30% tear.
Gwynn undertook a thorough rehabilitation program in which he
fired up 100 jump shots a day, ran up and down shut-off
escalators at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium and sprinted with a
parachute rigged to his back. "My legs feel great," he says.
"It's the best I've run in at least five years."
Moreover, Gwynn could begin to test-drive Williams's advice.
Where pitchers last season could routinely pound a wobbly Gwynn
inside, now he can whack those tight pitches out of the park.
"Now I know what he was talking about," Gwynn says. "I always
liked to back the ball up: The longer you can look at a pitch
the better your chances of hitting it. If you just let your
swing go, your chances of not hitting it or pulling it foul are
greater. So you've got to have confidence to turn on a pitch, to
trust letting it go. Hitting is all about being comfortable at
the plate. I've learned to get comfortable hitting this way.
"Everyone's pitching me the same way: soft away and hard in,"
Gwynn adds. "So I've learned to let it go, like Ted said. I keep
saying, How long is this going to work? When are they going to
go hard away again and I'll have to go back to how I made my
living?"
Williams, who was born in San Diego, was 23 when he hit .406. He
played his last game in 1960, the year that Gwynn was born. For
San Diego's home opener last season the Padres arranged for
Williams and Gwynn to ride together in a convertible to deliver
the first ball. Williams, a bit infirm from a stroke, tossed the
first ball, teetering dangerously as he let it go. Gwynn, at his
side, gave him a gentle but firm hand of support.
Williams was the last batter to hit .400 (that benchmark has
been reached a total of 28 times by 20 hitters, including 15
times by 12 hitters in the 19th century). Only four times has
anyone batted .400 after turning 30—none older than Cobb when
he was 35 in 1922. "After '94 I said, Well, that's as close as
I'll ever get," Gwynn says. "That year I was really locked in
and sprayed the ball. It made me think that if I ever made a run
[at .400], I could handle the attention, no problem. I never
thought so many people cared so much about it and that the
attention is every day. Can it be done? I don't know. It would
be frustrating not to at least take a shot. The best way to do
it would be to let me hang around quietly in the .380s and then
give me 30 games in September. That's 120 at bats, and I'd need
50 hits."
Says Rettenmund, "September would be so tough, I think you'd
need a cushion going in, like .416 or something. But it's not
ridiculous when you're talking about him."
Last week in St. Louis, Gwynn had a conversation with Musial.
Williams had quizzed him as ruthlessly as an old schoolmaster
might a freshman, but Musial connected with Gwynn. "I felt as
long as I got to here," Musial told Gwynn as he slightly dipped
an imaginary bat toward the pitcher with his top hand cocked
like a trigger, "I knew I was fine."
"That's it!" Gwynn gushed. "I feel the same way."
Then Musial said something that sounded as if he had pulled the
words out of Gwynn's head: "Sometimes I just had a feeling—not
guesswork, but intuition you could call it—that I was going to
get a certain pitch. More often than not I'd get it."
It rang so true that Gwynn laughed out loud. "It's hard to
explain, but it's a feeling," he said before last Saturday's
game. "It comes from experience and knowing what a pitcher is
trying to do."
For instance, earlier this year against Atlanta Braves
righthander Greg Maddux, Gwynn sat on a fastball away, got it
and pounded it for a double. "The next time up," Gwynn says, "I
figured he wouldn't think I'd be looking for a fastball away
again, so he threw another one and I carved that for a single.
The third time up I sat on a changeup on the first pitch. He
threw one, a real good one too, and I flipped it into
centerfield. Now I'm 3 for 3 and it's a process of elimination.
I figure he hasn't shown me that fastball he runs over the plate
inside. Once again I was right. I dropped a grenade into
centerfield for another hit, and as his momentum carried him to
first base he's cursing me up and down and shaking his head.
That's what you try to do: Get inside somebody's head."
Like the white pieces in chess or a two-year-old in a
restaurant, the pitcher initiates the action; the black pieces,
the parent and the hitter play reactionary roles. Nothing
happens until a pitcher decides how and where to throw the ball,
yet Gwynn's intelligence seems to allow him to gain the upper
hand. What's more, managers and infielders are spellbound too.
Managers study Gwynn's body language, trying to decipher when he
is flashing a hit-and-run sign to a base runner. (Gwynn often
puts on his own play, in which he might take the pitch if he
sees the runner has a superb jump or, upon noticing which middle
infielder is breaking for second base, hit to the vacated hole.)
Infielders try not to give away pitch locations by repositioning
themselves too soon. Cincinnati Reds second baseman Bret Boone
once told Gwynn, "I know you're watching every move I make."
With that knowledge stored over nearly 8,000 at bats, with fresh
legs and with some rustling from Teddy Ballgame, is it any
wonder Gwynn is having a career year? Actually, yes, considering
he is so old he faced Ferguson Jenkins, who was born in
1943—"He could sink it, run it and had a good changeup," Gwynn
says—and is one of 23 Cy Young Award winners Gwynn has batted
against. Gwynn has hit .342 against those elite
pitchers, including .364 against those still active and .406
against Atlanta's Tri-Young winners, Maddux, Tom Glavine and
John Smoltz.
Last Saturday, Gwynn faced a pitcher, Livan Hernandez, who was
born 31 years after Jenkins and who was pitching for a franchise
and a wild-card spot that did not exist when Gwynn began his
career. Gwynn went hitless in three at bats, matching his
longest hitless streak of the year, one game, a minislump that
extended on Sunday when he went 0 for 4.
Fifteen years ago he whacked two hits against the Philadelphia
Phillies. The first was a double that brought the first baseman
trailing the play close enough to talk to him at second base.
"Hey, kid, what are you trying to do, catch me in one night?"
Pete Rose asked Gwynn.
The best hitter since Williams smiles 2,705 hits later. "Man, it
seems like yesterday," he says. "The years, they've flown by."
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