Gwynn Won’t Allow Life at the Top of Heap to Go to Head, or Bat

Just one morning in my life I want to wake up feeling terrible, stagger to the front door and pick up the morning paper, rip it open to the sports section, find the list of the major leagues’ leading batters, either league, and, when my eyes focus sufficiently, see my name at the top.

What a thrill! To know that every pitcher fears you, that every opposing manager curses you, that every kid in town is fighting to be you in the sandlot games.

Tony Gwynn has this experience every morning.

Gwynn is the right fielder for the San Diego Padres, and he can hit anything stamped with Chub Feeney’s autograph. In Tony’s first full season in the big leagues, 1984, he hit .351 and led the National League.

In the Monday morning paper this week, Tony was hitting .345. Top of the chart.

He was also leading the National League in runs scored, hits and on-base percentage. But the Big List is what really counts, and nobody was close to Tony on that batting leader chart. Gwynn says sure, he reads the paper every day, checks all the box scores and statistics, but he’s mostly concerned with standings, the team stats. He jokes about how former teammate Alan Wiggins told him that the strongest man in the league is the guy at the bottom of the list, holding up the rest of the league. Sort of a combination Atlas and Bob Uecker.

Personally, I choose to disbelieve Tony’s modesty. I want to picture him swaggering around his house, swatting imaginary fastballs with his rolled-up newspaper, snarling, “Sorry, Fernando baby, that one was right in my wheelhouse,” or “Was that your fastball, Dwight, or were you throwing out the ceremonial first ball?”

If you can’t enjoy being at the top of that list, if you can’t gloat a little, what’s the use being up there?

Tony Gwynn, one of the nicest people you will ever meet in baseball, isn’t even sure he belongs on the same page with guys named Boggs and Mattingly, let alone on the top of any list.

“They all can hit ,” Gwynn says. “People put me in the same class. Personally I don’t feel I belong there. They all know a lot about hitting. They’re great mechanical hitters. I just go up there and hit the ball.

“The last thing I think about at the plate is technique--where your elbows are, weight transfer. . . . I’m a scuffler. What I do might not look pretty, there’s nothing scientific about it.”

Tony is not a student, he is a fan. He’ll watch games all day on TV.

“There’s nothing as pretty as Wade Boggs,” Gwynn says. “I was watching him the other day, against (Joe) Niekro. Boggs fouled off six in a row, and Niekro threw him an eephus (high-arc lob) pitch. Anyone else would have lunged out of the box. Boggs never moved his hands, not an inch. He stood there and tapped his front foot--pat . . . pat . . . pat. . . . Then he hit a line drive over Niekro’s head. It gave me goose bumps.

“The man’s the best, without a doubt. He’s phenomenal. He can hit the ball anyplace, any time, anywhere; hard stuff, soft stuff, breaking pitches.”

A scientific hitter such as Boggs, or Don Mattingly, waits for his pitch.

Gwynn waits for a pitch.

He is either hyper-aggressive or terribly impatient. Boggs and Mattingly wait for a pitch somewhere in their personal hitting zones. Gwynn waits for a pitch somewhere in his postal zone.

Then he hits it exactly where the hell he wants to hit it. Gwynn is one of the few hitters alive, outside of slow-pitch softball, who checks out the gaps between the infielders, then hits the ball--aims it--through the gaps. If the infielders cheat by moving on him while the pitcher is winding up, Tony hits it where they were .

The Dodgers play Tony this way: third baseman hugging the line, shortstop shading toward second. Last Sunday, Tony, a lefty, slashed an RBI single exactly midway between those two infielders. Later he found another hole, 400 feet in dead center, for a triple.

In the three-game series, Gwynn got to Dodger pitchers for nine hits and five runs. He also had three stolen bases.

And yet Tony can’t tell you precisely how he does it. He’s no physicist.

Sports Illustrated ran a story in the spring, a conversation on hitting, with Mattingly, Boggs and Ted Williams. They got real technical. Had Gwynn been in that room, when talk turned to zones and weight transfers Tony probably would have said, “Uh, hey, how about those Celtics?”

“The only thing I agreed with Ted Williams about,” Tony said, referring to the article, “was the bit about wood burning. That’s happened to me a couple times.”

Williams said in the story that once in a great while, when he got a super fastball and took a great swing, and zinged a foul tip, he could smell the wood of his bat burning.

This is a useful trick if you’re ever on a camping trip with Nolan Ryan and you forget the matches.

All I know is, if you can set fire to your bat with a foul tip, imagine what you can do by making decent contact. Only guys like Tony Gwynn know that feeling.

The rest of us can only dream, about hitting everything thrown our way and about being on the top of the Big List.