Bat Man

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 (box, below). 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.