Hitting The Wall

Never mind McGwire, Griffey and Sosa. The closest three-way race this season features Tony Gwynn, Nap Lajoie and Jesse (the Crab) Burkett. Last year Gwynn hit .372 to improve his lifetime average to .340, good for eighth place on die alltime list of hitters with at least 8,000 at bats. But when Dodgers pitcher Brian Bohanon induced him to hit into a double play on July 12, Gwynn fell victim to something he had never suffered through the first 2,173 games of his remarkable career: an 0-for-15 slump.

Six times previously Gwynn's 0-fers had reached 14 but never beyond. This streak would eventually extend to 0 for 19, which hardly seems like die end of the world. The Dodgers' Gil Hodges went 0 for 21 in the 1952 World Series. Pitcher Bob Buhl of the Cubs went 0 for 70 in '62. Yet even batmeister Gwynn admitted to the yips. "[My] confidence was slipping through the windows," he said last week.

If Gwynn was worried, so too were historians, who wondered if he had hit the baseball equivalent of the marathoners' wall and had begun to decline. Images arose of Mickey Mantle, who lingered with the Yankees just long enough to drop from a lifetime .302 average through his penultimate season to a .298 for eternity.

Does such a wall exist? It seemed to for Burkett in 1903 and for Lajoie a decade later. Burkett, a cantankerous (hence the Crab appellation) two-time .400 hitter for the Cleveland Spiders in the 1890s, was still tooling along at a career .350 clip with 7,273 career at bats through '03, according to Total Baseball. He played two more years, batting .264 in that period, and ended at .3384, which is now good for ninth place among hitters with 8,000 at bats. (Through Sunday, Gwynn was still eighth, but had dipped to .3385.) Gwynn's situation is even more chillingly reminiscent of Lajoie's story. The great second baseman hit .350 through the 1913 season but only .262 the rest of the way, leaving him at .3381 alltime. Lajoie had 8,254 at bats at the end of '13; Gwynn had 8,187 at the end of '97

The great hitters do seem to hit a barrier somewhere between 7,500 and 9,000 at bats. Ty Cobb was hitting .373 through 8,762; he hit .346 in his final 2,672 and finished at .366. Wee Willie Keeler was "hitting 'em where they ain't" to the tune of .355 through 7,475 at bats; he finished at .341 after batting .253 in his final four seasons. Honus Wagner lost 14 points off his career average after his 8,237th at bat, Paul Waner dropped nine after his 8,191st, and Rogers Hornsby lost three after his 7,915th.

Imminent cataclysm is not implied here. "Oh, yeah," Padres manager Bruce Bochy said the day that Gwynn hit the 0-for-15 mark at Dodger Stadium, "we'll be sending Tony down to [Triple A] Las Vegas any day now." Dodgers announcer Ross Porter noted that Gwynn's 0 for 19 could have gone on just a little bit longer before his lifetime .300 average would be jeopardized. After Sunday's game the exact figure was 0 for 1,109, at which point he'd still be hitting .299511.

Of course by then his equally extraordinary good humor might have waned a bit, too. When I saw Gwynn in the dugout at Dodger Stadium, he was holding a small metallic device in one hand, so I asked him about the hamstring he had aggravated reaching for Cal Ripken's double at the All-Star Game. I pointed at the machine and asked, "Is that your electric stimulator? Is that your stim?"

Gwynn laughed hard. "No, man. That's my mini-CD player. Will you relax?"