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Fear of failure His lifetime average is .335 -- and climbing! -- but as Tony Gwynn zeroes in on a sixth batting title he still hones his stroke and obsesses over his videotapesBy Richard Hoffer Issue date: September 18, 1995
So, with his San Diego Padres on a trip to Los Angeles, Gwynn prepared to deliver. He phoned his mom in nearby Long Beach, said he had bragged on her pies and asked her to bake a pair for the postgame spread. Vendella was furious at her son's presumption. "I could bake them," she said to him, seething, "but what if they're no good? You're just going to embarrass me." Furious or not, she baked a pair of pecan pies, and they were added to the post-game smorgasbord. Now, anybody who has ever seen baseball players attack a spread is reminded anew how recently we've been promoted from the animal kingdom. The pies were consumed just like that, without anyone pronouncing any more judgment than one of those artery-clearing thumps to the chest. As with any postgame meal, it was probably enough that no one got hurt, and all Gwynn could do afterward was examine the empty pie tins and report to his mother that when all was said and done, nobody got embarrassed that he could tell. A typical Gwynn family production, when you think about it: the pie story as defining metaphor. Like his mom, Gwynn is motivated by fear of failure, produces small events in a reliable fashion and is, despite 14 seasons of 1-for-3 work at the plate, as humble and as taken for granted as a pecan pie in a postgame spread. Tony Gwynn is talking, talking, talking. He is a .400 talker, the only one in baseball. His wife, Alicia, the school chum he only later recognized as something more than a batting-practice pitcher, says the man doesn't make two peeps when he's at home. "Oh, he might come out of the game room all of a sudden and say, 'What's for dinner?'" she reports. But sitting in front of his cubicle, six hours before a game, rolling a bat in his hands, he won't shut up, not when it comes to baseball. You can locate him from around corners, since all his stories end on a high-pitched squeak. "Mike Schmidt once said, 'You can always teach a guy to hit .300,'" Gwynn begins. "But you can't teach him how to hit it out of a ballpark." He rolls the bat. "People want to see home runs. At first I was annoyed by that. But now I see, basically, he's right. Took me a long time to grasp it. I mean, I hit .370 in 1987, and I finished eighth in the MVP voting. I couldn't understand that then. Last year I hit .394, and I finished seventh. I'm getting the picture. But it annoyed me for a long time." If no longer annoyed, he remains defensive. The motives of a contact hitter, even one of the best ever to play the game, are always suspect. "One thing I've found is that we're called selfish more than anybody else," he says. "It's happened to me. It's happened to every contact hitter who's played the game. It's just a by-product of what we do. Anytime you're trying to do something perfect, so focused on what you do -- well, it's not always pretty." Another story, nonbakery division: In 1991 Gwynn was cruising toward his fifth batting title, the one that would have separated him from Bill Madlock and Roberto Clemente. Batting titles were not then, or ever, a matter of casual interest to the Gwynns. Gwynn was batting .337, even on an increasingly bad left wheel, playing for a typically mediocre San Diego team. His title, if properly protected, was in the bag. And because knee surgery was inevitable, his father, Charles, suggested -- insisted -- that Gwynn retire for the season. "You're not helping yourself, you're not helping your team," Charles barked at him. "Sit down and win your title." Gwynn played on until, with 21 games remaining and his average down to .317, he finally surrendered to arthroscopic surgery. His father was beside himself. The Atlanta Braves' Terry Pendleton was going to win a batting title that could have been retired weeks ago. "I told you! I told you!" Charles kept shouting at his son. Tony tried to explain, "Dad, you can't win a batting title that way. You just can't." It would have been ... embarrassing. Gwynn finally won that fifth batting title last season, hitting .394 in a strike-shortened year that could well have produced the first .400 season since Ted Williams's in 1941. It was special. But his dad had died in 1993. "That fifth title bugged him forever," Gwynn says. At week's end Gwynn was batting .363 -- leading the league, of course. But he hadn't really kicked into gear until Aug. 27, when Los Angeles Dodger catcher Mike Piazza, who'd been injured earlier in the season, finally had enough at bats to qualify for the league lead. At the time Gwynn was hitting .357 to Piazza's .367. After Sunday's game and a 13-game streak during which he hit .400, however, Gwynn had overtaken Piazza, who was at .360. Gwynn's brother Chris, a Dodger outfielder, had telephoned Tony to tell him how much Piazza was talking about winning the batting crown. "Oh, man, he wants it bad," Chris had said. "I know what it's like for anyone who's in a batting race for the first time," Tony says, "but I'm in a position where I don't worry about it anymore. I mean, if I don't win this year, do I feel like I can come back and win it next year? Yeah, sure." Earlier this season Gwynn surpassed Wade Boggs of the New York Yankees to become the active major leaguer with the highest career batting average (through Sunday he was at .335). At age 35 he is turning on the inside pitch more than ever, and his run production is up: He is on pace to drive in 109 runs (his previous high was 72, in 1990). Padre batting coach Merv Rettenmund says the book has changed on Gwynn the last three years. "He's not just a contact hitter," Retten mund says. "He drives the ball." Still, Gwynn is sitting in front of his cubicle in Atlanta, rolling his bat in his hands and lamenting the poor, pitiful season he has been having, how he muddled around near .300 before he finally found his stroke. Even though he has clearly found it now, tonight, as always, Gwynn will take back to his hotel a tape he has made of the game on a small VCR he carries on the road and hooks up to clubhouse monitors. Then, with a second VCR he totes, he will transfer his at bats to another tape. He will actually edit those at bats onto three separate tapes -- one for good at bats, where he might have worked the count, fouled off tough pitches, just generally not gotten embarrassed; one of at bats with hits; and one of the swings that actually produced the hits. "If there are bad at bats on the tapes, I just click them out," he says. "Watch 'em once, click 'em out. You don't want to watch yourself looking like an idiot, waving at some curveball." This system -- refined from his out-of-control, preexpansion days when he carried 11 tapes on the road with his at bats against the 11 other National League teams -- was born in 1983, only a year later than his son Anthony, who now travels with the team during the summer. Tony and Alicia had purchased the camera gear to document Anthony's growth, but with Gwynn on the road and in a slump so profound that manager Dick Williams actually benched him, they found a more professional use for it. "I called home, told my wife to tape my at bats," says Gwynn. "Just hit the record button whenever I came to the plate. When I got home and looked at it, I saw right away what I was doing. I couldn't wait to get to the ballpark and correct it. Took me 15 swings. Hit .333 the rest of the year." Since then he has gone to the tape more often than Marv Albert, and a legend has grown around Gwynn and his remote control. "It drives people crazy," he says. "It's tedious, splitting cables and everything, and I know it gets on people's nerves. But it works. In this game if you're successful, that means getting hits three out of 10 times. I'm trying to tap into the other 70 percent, and I don't mind doing it. It's not hard spending 20 minutes a day -- pause, record, fast forward." He's squeaking again. If there's more to the story, only dogs tuned into higher auditory registers can hear it. A lot of people have tried to push Gwynn's buttons -- his dad, the Padres -- but they don't get it. His dad wanted him to bail out of San Diego three years ago, when ownership conducted its season-long fire sale of high-priced talent. "This team isn't going anywhere," Charles told Tony. "Get out of Dodge!" But Gwynn wouldn't. Sure, it would have been nice to go with a winner -- he still remembers, from his only postseason action, the first game of the 1984 World Series when the home crowd gave the Padres a standing ovation for doing wind sprints -- but how do you guarantee that? It always came back to the same things, the inviting gaps in Jack Murphy Stadium, the soft grass, the perfect weather, the low profile he enjoys in San Diego. "The thing is," he says, "I'm happy here. One of the reasons I've been successful is that I'm not bigger than big. There's not that much pressure, not that much hype here. We've got one newspaper that travels with the team. You've got to have time and room to work at your craft. They aren't that demanding in San Diego." So, early in 1994, only months after his father died of heart problems, Gwynn did what he has always done. After he was assured by new ownership that the Padres did indeed intend to compete, he told them he preferred to remain in San Diego. Prompted by the Padres' suggestion of a contract extension, Gwynn told his longtime agent, John Boggs, to negotiate one. Boggs, whose client was still under contract for one more year at $4 million and who was without any leverage whatsoever, went in for a deal. "He's a little difficult to represent," Boggs says laughing. "I would take less to stay here," Gwynn says, "and the Padres knew it. They could take advantage of it -- they should take advantage of it -- and they did." Still, the Padres came through with $4 million a year through 1997, with an option year and a bonus clause here and there. "They could have had me for $3 million," Gwynn admits. "For what I do?" -- he shrugs -- "I'm happy." See, the Padres don't understand him either. Here's one more Gwynn story from the nonbakery division: In 1986, in a game at Montreal, Gwynn alone among the Padres was going hitless. Frustrating, of course. But then the Expos, out of pitchers, brought in Vance Law from second base to throw to Gwynn, whose frustration went straight to humiliation when he grounded back to second. "It's still on my mind," he says. People think rich contracts drive him? Batting titles? "Vance Law," he says. "You probably don't know him. But I carry that at bat around every day." The strike-shortened season of '94 was tragic for the numbers left hanging in the ether of uncompleted history: Matt Williams's 43 home runs, Gwynn's .394. Had the season played out, who knows what records might have been broken? You can't project those kinds of things: A sweet stroke can depart just like that. But it is fair to say that as the season was nearing its climax, Tony Gwynn was a tough out. And he was looking forward to a run at .400 and the kind of once-in-a-lifetime stretch when the media descend for a final look-see at one of those seminal events they are obliged to cover en masse. "There was no pressure to that point," Gwynn says of the season's premature ending on Aug. 12. "The pressure would have come in September. I had talked to Rod Carew and George Brett, asked what it was like to make a run at .400. Both said it was unbelievable, so tough to go about your business. Now, I'm not a Pete Rose, a guy who thrives on that kind of attention. But I kind of wanted to go through it, to get a taste of it. You don't really know what you're made of until you do. I don't think I'd have been destroyed by it, but you can't really say, can you?" Well, yes, you can. Gwynn would hardly have been destroyed by it. Even though he remains amazed by big league attention -- after a road trip, he will marvel at the "deluge" of publicity that he attracts -- he deflects it more naturally than he knows. One imagines him, postgame, entertaining the press at his cubicle, rolling his bat in his hands. "I go 4 for 5," he might say, "average goes up one point! One point!" You can hear the squeak. Still, it didn't happen, did it? The best that came of the whole affair was a summons from Ted Williams himself, an invite to his museum in Florida during the winter to talk baseball. Williams, among other things, is Gwynn's favorite author. Gwynn first got a copy of Williams's 1970 bible, The Science of Hitting, while he was attending San Diego State. He paid four dollars for the paperback version, and he has marked it up like a guy researching a Ph.D. Passages are highlighted, margins are filled with notes. The cover page, which shows a strike zone filled with baseballs, each of them with an average attached (Williams's estimate of a batter's stats if he hit pitches only in that area), has been committed to memory. Gwynn rereads it two or three times a year. "What I should do," he says, "is bring it with me on road trips." Rereading the book before his .394 season is what started him thinking about turning on the inside pitch a bit more instead of waiting to slap the outside pitch, his bread and butter. "Worked," he says. "Had a chance to drive in 90 runs." The meeting with Williams was a lifetime highlight, although as usual, Gwynn was put on the defensive. "We talked for half an hour," Gwynn says, "and I never got a word in edgewise. Anyway, he's telling me how I 'block the ball off'" -- that is, throwing the bat in front of the ball, which often shoots it to leftfield, instead of taking a hefty cut. "He says, 'I don't know what you call it, I call it blocking it off. And I'm one who believes that history is made from the ball inside.' I start laughing, but then I think he's right," Gwynn says. "The guys you think about -- Henry Aaron, Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt -- hit the inside pitch. And he says to me, 'Big as you are'" -- Gwynn is 5'11", 215 pounds -- "'you should be hitting the ball out.' I said, 'Wait a minute, you're getting into territory that's been a big problem for me. No question, for most people, you're right. But if you don't do it well, why focus on it?' We went around and around on that. Got into it a little bit." This insistence on home runs will always remain troublesome. Not that Gwynn, who has hit a mere 86 home runs in his career, doesn't acknowledge the charisma of the home run hitter. But that persona just isn't him. "Those guys strike out 100 times a year," he says. "Can you imagine that? I couldn't live with that. They've got to let it go to do what they do, swing big, can't be afraid to fail. That's not me. I've struck out 14 times this year, and I didn't enjoy that. You know what I was thinking in the All-Star Game, up against [Seattle Mariner fastballer] Randy Johnson? Don't strike out. Get the barrel on the ball. I flied out, wasn't very productive, but a moral victory for me. Type of guy I am, I guess. I don't like to be embarrassed." A hotel room, past midnight, blackout drapes drawn. The game is over, long over, the spread attacked, and the blue fluorescence of a television washes the dim walls. An announcer on the TV notices that Gwynn is well up in the batter's box, to take away the curve, obviously. "Interesting observation," says Gwynn. "I've only been standing there my whole life." The batter suddenly lines a shot up the middle that caroms off the pitcher, who recovers and throws the batter out. "Hits him in the shin and stays right in front of him!" shouts Gwynn. He calms. "Well, that was all you could do. I'm not embarrassed by that. Look, I'm rounding first base like I got a base hit." The game is fast-forwarded, and, before you know it, Gwynn is at bat again, with a runner on third. The Atlanta pitcher has a 3-0 count on Gwynn. The papers the next day say Pedro Borbon fully intended to walk Gwynn. But it's hard to get anything hittable past a hitter who doesn't really acknowledge a strike zone. "It's a slider away," Gwynn says. "Not that bad a pitch for him, not that far outside. My whole assignment here is to go to left, don't even want to try and pull this guy." On TV, Gwynn swings inside out -- contact! -- and the ball is lined over short; the runner scores. The camera cuts to Brave manager Bobby Cox. Is he steamed! "That's exactly what I wanted to do," Gwynn says. "That was a good at bat for me." Tony Gwynn hunches over, the remote in his hand, bathed in this unnatural moonlight. He fast-forwards the tape. Pauses, dubs, fast-forwards. He hopes to find another good at bat, where the guy's not lunging at the ball, not waving at some stupid curve, not looking like an idiot. All the guy on the TV has to do is get the barrel on the ball, make contact. And maybe nobody will remember how foolish he looks the other, well, two thirds of the time. "If there are bad at bats on the tapes, I just click them out." Issue date: September 18, 1995
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