Lenny Ignelzi/AP Tony Gwynn, Mr. Padre, leaves us with plenty of baseball memories, with perhaps his most impressive being his chase for .400 that was cut short by the player's strike in 1994.
Bud Black is now the manager of the San Diego Padres, a team that was the beneficiary of Tony Gwynn's grace and talent for two decades, and this is what Black told me on Monday when he learned of Gwynn's death from cancer at the age of 54.
"It is a loss for the Padres," Bud Black said, "and a loss for the baseball community."
Black got right to it, then, with a sentiment as simple and pure and honest as Tony Gwynn's swing. And you should know that "baseball community" in this case means anybody who ever played with Tony Gwynn or against him, anyone who ever saw him hit or was lucky enough to know him. He was only the best pure hitter since Ted Williams. He was to the Padres as Stan Musial was to the Cardinals.
And once there was a baseball summer, cut short in August of 1994, the season cancelled and the World Series cancelled because of the last war between the owners and players, when he was on his way to being the first .400 hitter since Williams. One San Diego kid trying to chase another into history, before that chance was taken away from him in the middle of August.
That was Gwynn's chance to do something that Williams had last done in 1941 when he'd hit .406. He was hitting .394 when the season was called off. Maybe he wouldn't have been able to do it. Maybe even his swing wouldn't have stood up enough when August became September. But I will always believe he would have done it. And believe that Tony Gwynn believed it until he died Monday.
DENIS POROY/AP Tony Gwynn spends his career aiming to be perfect, resulting in 19 straight seasons in which he hit at least .300.When he talked about the summer of '94 and what he was trying to do, he talked about trying to get to "four bills."
The first time he said that to me was on a summer afternoon at old Shea Stadium in '94. I was out there to write a piece about him for Esquire magazine. And before I found the piece on Monday, what I remembered best was just one of the best afternoons I have ever had in a ballpark, sitting first in the visitors clubhouse and then in the dugout and then on the field, talking about hitting a baseball with Tony Gwynn, and then watching him hit with the place quiet except for the sound of the ball on his bat.
This is what he said that day, the kid from San Diego State talking about the legendary ballplayer known as The Kid, Ted Williams:
"I'd wondered my whole life if I could be consistent enough across a whole season and then stay there. I wondered if I could make my run."
He had made his run. Then it wasn't the pressure of one of the magic numbers of his sport or any sport that stopped him. It was a strike. But he never complained about it. He just kept hitting.
Before the internet, before a few keystrokes could tell you the story of a man's baseball life, we used the Baseball Encyclopedia. And there are pages in that thick, wonderful book that I always said gave off a beam of light. Warren Spahn had a page like that, because of 363 victories in the big leagues, in a career that really didn't begin until he was 26, after World War II.
Gwynn has a page like that, a page that tells you that he hit .300 in 19 straight seasons. Maybe that is why Williams himself one long-ago night at the Ted Williams Museum in Florida, after an event hosted by my friend Bob Costas, told Gwynn afterward, the two of them just talking about hitting, that he had always considered Tony Gwynn a "magician" with the bat.
Gwynn hit over .350 seven times in his career. Seven. He never struck out more than 40 times in a season. He won eight batting championships and played in two World Series, pulling the '84 Tigers in one and then Torre's Yankees in 1998, at the end of one of the storied seasons in baseball history. Gwynn and the Padres got swept. He still got eight hits in those four games, on the greatest stage of his career, and hit .500.
Mike Groll/AP Gwynn's 3,141 career hits, eight batting titles, .338 career average and two NL pennants help earn him a well-deserved plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.I told him that day at old Shea, when he was telling me about traveling with his own VCR machine on the road, taping the game he'd played that night, watching his swings, analyzing them, when he got back to his hotel room afterward. In the story I wrote that summer for Esquire, Tony Gwynn said, "What drives me is trying to be perfect."
There was this wonderful moment at Shea when it was time for Gwynn to go to work, in t-shirt and blue shorts. He turned and told me to watch, wherever the next pitch was, he was going to shoot a ball over where a shortstop would have been playing. That is exactly what he did on the next pitch he saw. And looked as happy as a Little League kid getting the first clean hit of his whole life.
When I left him that day I told him that it had been a very good day for me at the ballpark. Tony Gwynn smiled and shook my hand and said, "They're all good days."
He finally coached his alma mater, San Diego State, after his retirement from the Padres, coached them until cancer of the salivary gland made him too weak and too ill to continue. Now he dies young the way Kirby Puckett, another baseball star built the way Tony was, one who loved the game the way Tony did, died even younger. They were born a couple of months apart in 1960.
So Tony Gwynn, one of the best hitters of them all, leaves us too soon the way Kirby Puckett did. But he leaves us with the memory of his love of the game and the science of hitting, such a sweet disposition, that sweet swing. And of course that summer 20 years ago when he made his run at Ted Williams, and came up just short of four bills.
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/lupica-mr-padre-hit-machine-leaves-great-baseball-memories-article-1.1832268
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