A Quiet Man Could Be Next to Hit .400

At the recent major league All-Star game, one guy was teed off because he didn’t make the squad, another because he made the team but only got used as a pinch-hitter. Others brought notes from their doctors to get out of going.

Tony Gwynn didn’t make a peep, but he probably should have been busting up the clubhouse with a bat, pulling sinks off the wall, kicking water coolers, throwing ham sandwiches onto ceilings.

All Tony Gwynn was doing on the eve of the All-Star break was batting .370, leading the league, scoring runs, stealing bases, throwing out runners--doing everything an All-Star starter is meant to do.

When last seen, Tony Gwynn was getting just a few more votes than the bat boy. He was seventh vote-getter in a league where he was batting 35 to 60 points higher than anyone who was outpolling him.

He got in the game only as a pinch-hitter, one quick spell in the twilight of Oakland Coliseum and back to the dugout.

Well, maybe, this was just a one-time, flash-in-the-pan performance? Like so many players, maybe Tony was just putting together an over-his-head season?

Hardly. Tony Gwynn is one of the best strikers of the baseball in the game today. Maybe ever. He won the batting championship only three years ago with a gaudy .351, and Tony Gwynn has never batted under .300 in any full season in his career.

Tony’s problem is, he plays in San Diego. Now, San Diego is a nice place if you’re the captain of an aircraft carrier or a petty officer 2nd class or the mayor. When it’s not so nice is when you take the field in the uniform of the San Diego Padres, who are to baseball what the seltzer siphon is to burlesque.

Tony is like San Diego--sunny, 75 degrees, barometer steady, wind out of the southwest at no more than 5 m.p.h. And tomorrow, more of the same. Tony, too, has one of the best climates in the world.

Tony would get more attention if he were a platoon player in New York. He might get more attention if he were a lamp post in New York.

Tony Gwynn set off this year as if he might find that Holy Grail of baseball--the .400 year. But just as he began to heat up the season, spraying base hits to all fields, beating out infield choppers, muscling up for the occasional long ball, that character in Boston, Wade Boggs, usually managed to keep 10 base hits and 5 points ahead of him. As Sparky Anderson points out, it’s an annoying habit Boggs has.

It’s the story of Tony Gwynn’s life. The Padres finally win a pennant in 1984? Gwynn hits .351? Forget it. Steve Garvey wins the pennant with a home run in most people’s memory bank.

Does any of this bother Tony Gwynn? Not likely. Tony just smiles.

“Look, baseball fans like home runs,” he explains. “They like RBIs, they like big hits. That’s what they pay to see.”

Tony’s hits may not be big. But there are 200 of them a season. Laid end to end, they might tend to get pretty big, you would imagine. Two out of the last three years, Tony has led the league in hits. Last year, he tied for the lead in runs.

“I kind of put the ball in play,” says Gwynn, shrugging.

Well, of course, so did Ty Cobb. And in San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium, which is not exactly a band box, it’s a good thing to be able to do.

Can he put the ball in play enough to hit .400? A lot of people around the league think, if anyone can, Tony Gwynn can.

First of all, there’s the temperament. Gwynn’s unflappability, lack of mood swings, matter-of-fact acceptance of what he’s been pitched, make him a serious candidate.

“Tony will not start to get dark circles under his eyes or nervous tics if he gets up to .400 and the TV cameras start to come out and the pressure starts to build up,” predicts writer Phil Collier, a longtime Gwynn watcher. “Tony kind of likes the media.”

If he has the temperament for it, he also has the talent. In the words of a former manager, Jim Frey, “Tony Gwynn has reduced hitting to its simplest essentials: He sees the ball, he hits the ball--and he keeps running till it stops rolling around the outfield.”

No one has hit .400 in the National League since Bill Terry in 1930, 57 years ago. Tony’s problem is, if he does it, will anyone notice? Will he get to bat twice in next year’s All-Star game? Will he even get any MVP votes? The last guy to bat .400 in the major leagues, Ted Williams, didn’t win it that year, and the best Tony Gwynn, batting .329, could do in last year’s MVP balloting was one fifth-place vote.

Maybe Gwynn has to bat .500 to win it. Maybe he should start to hit something besides baseballs with that bat. Hardly anybody hits baseballs any better, and look at all the good that’s done him.