Batting Title Again in Gwynn’s Sights, but He’d Like to Have First Half Back

In a cluttered, vibrant game such as the one Tony Gwynn plays, a man is at his lowest when he finds himself most alone.

It was the first Tuesday in May. The Padres had lost to the Chicago Cubs, 13-5. Gwynn had gone 0 for 3.

The season was 25 games old and he had 1 homer, 2 doubles, 4 RBIs and a plummeting batting average that wouldn’t stop until it hit .237.

The game ended at 10:10 p.m. Gwynn left the San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium clubhouse at 10:30 p.m. It was late and his wife, Alicia, was expecting him home.

But he didn’t go home. He couldn’t go home. He turned the car around. He headed toward the San Diego School of Baseball, of which he is part-owner.

“The best thing about that title,” Gwynn said, “is that I get a key.”

He pulled into the parking lot, climbed out of his car, stuck the key in the school’s door and entered. He turned on the lights. He climbed out of his street clothes--which he had worn for all of 15 minutes--and changed into his sweats.

He stepped into a batting cage, filled up a pitching machine with balls, set the machine at 60 m.p.h., all fastballs, and picked up a bat.

And then he hit. For 60 minutes, he hit.

Alone, with the only sound the bat meeting the ball, he hit.

“A lot of times in a batting cage, I’ll wear my Walkman headphones, play my jazz music,” he said. “But this time, I didn’t deserve it. I listened to nothing.”

Around 11:30 p.m., he picked up his bats, threw his nice clothes in a bag and climbed back into his car. He drove home.

Alicia met him at the front door with, “Where were you? What’s going on?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

Between haircuts, Tony Gwynn has gone being from the fourth-best hitter on the Padres to one of the top 10 in the league. To understand how is to understand how much.

How much work. How much frustration. How much, after all his problems, winning another batting title would mean to him.

“Nothing,” Gwynn said on a recent rainy afternoon in Pittsburgh. “I’m not going to be proud of a batting title. It can’t erase the first half of my season. It can’t make up for how bad I’ve been.

“My other two batting titles I was proud of because they were complete seasons. This year, I am not proud.”

It is this incessant perfectionism that has brought Gwynn back to a level that, in a game in which a 30% success rate buys near-immortality, can be considered darn-near perfect. After the Padres’ 3-1 victory in Chicago Thursday, Gwynn had hit in 16 consecutive games, at an astounding .507 pace (34 of 67).

In those 16 days, beginning with a 2-for-4 evening July 2 against St. Louis, he has raised his batting average 60 points, from .246 to its present .306, placing him squarely in the league’s top few.

“Amazing,” said teammate Mark Grant. “Unbelievable.”

“I believe it,” said teammate Greg Booker. “Shoot, I’ve seen him hit like this for two months. “

Pause. “Well, maybe not just like this.”

But Gwynn is not satisfied, as evidenced by that recent afternoon in Pittsburgh when rain eliminated batting practice and any other form of play until the 7:35 p.m. start. It didn’t matter. Gwynn was still at the park at 3:00 p.m., forever the first one there.

He changed into his uniform pants and sweat shirt and retired to a corner to study videotapes of the previous night’s swings. In a doubleheader, he had gone 4 for 10 with a home run and four RBIs.

“That’s the one thing about Tony that never changes,” Grant observed. “He works the same all the time--hard--no matter what he’s hitting. That’s what we all see.”

Yet this year has been marked by what they couldn’t see, and didn’t understand, beginning with Gwynn’s hasty return from finger surgery this spring. The operation was supposed to keep him out six weeks; he missed only two and returned to a life of awkwardness and discomfort.

He went 2 for 4 in the season’s second game in Houston on April 6 to give him a .333 average, but he then went 0 for 4 the next night in San Francisco to drop to .200.

Until Wednesday night--July 20--he was not above .300 again.

He struggled around .280, then .250, then finally bottomed out June 13 when he went 0 for 3 against San Francisco to fall to .237.

He struggled with little things such as the placement of his hands, and big things such as his stride.

Some say he struggled with his injuries, the finger and a sprained thumb that kept him out 15 days in May. He said he did not.

“Injuries had nothing to do with it; they never have,” Gwynn said. “I would know if they did, and I would say it.”

Manager Jack McKeon came up with a different theory. He thought Gwynn was struggling with the burden of carrying a losing team.

“He may have felt too much weight on his shoulders, felt the club was not winning because he wasn’t hitting,” McKeon said. “He thought our problems were all his fault and put too much pressure on himself.”

Gwynn nixed that theory, too. Looking back, which he hates doing, Gwynn says the problem was the same most human beings have.

The problem with being human.

“I was struggling because I had to come to grips with the fact that I was struggling,” said Gwynn, who entered the season with a career average of .334. “I had to realize I’m not a machine. That I can go into a slump like everyone else. That I’m human.”

The worse it got, the more he realized this.

Only a human would feel bad doing television commercials when he’s hitting .240. “That’s how I felt,” Gwynn said. “Once when I was injured, I was watching TV when my Mitsubishi commercial came on, when I was talking about teamwork and dedication and all that, and I just felt terrible. I felt I was going against all those things.”

Another time during the slump, he was asked to awaken at 7 a.m. to shoot a McDonald’s commercial, and and he could barely get himself to the set.

“All I could think of was, ‘Why do they still want me?’ ” he said.

And only a human would forsake all his knowledge and technique and one day throw on Keith Moreland’s lucky Huey Lewis T-shirt.

“I wore it once, got two hits and then gave it back,” Gwynn said. “I thought, ‘I don’t need this.’ ”

The beginning of the end of the slump, as with so many beginnings for Gwynn, came at 3 p.m. July 5 with a batting practice pitcher and a bag of balls and an otherwise empty field. It was in San Diego, and, although Gwynn was working on a three-game hitting streak, he still wasn’t feeling right.

He coerced Mike Lord, the left-handed batting practice pitcher, to meet him on the field before everyone else arrived. For 20 minutes, the guy threw his best stuff, and the left-handed-hitting Gwynn took his best hacks. Twenty solid minutes of swings.

Gwynn swung so hard and so long, he reinjured his surgically repaired left index finger. But it hurt so good. Like his swing, it suddenly felt right. And right then, Tony Gwynn knew.

“That was it,” he said. “I was on the way back.”

Back indeed. That night, he had three hits against Pittsburgh’s Bob Walk, and although his left finger has not stopped hurting, Gwynn has not stopped hitting.

Gwynn talks about how such a streak goes through phases, the way a child does.

“First you are swinging the bat better, not getting hits, but swinging better,” Gwynn said. “Then you get a few hits that sneak through. Then you start hitting line drives.

“Then you start hitting all ball on the screws, hit them up the alleys, hitting them everywhere, finally hitting them out of the park.”

And where is Gwynn? Well, where do you think?

“The last phase,” he confessed before laughing. “And imagine, before, I couldn’t even hit a fly ball. Tell you what, it’s no fun going 0 for 4 every night and coming home not having a clue.”

It’s fun now. The media crowd has returned--there were actually nine reporters around his locker last week in St. Louis--and the big question has come up once again.

As crazy as this may have sounded a month ago, can Tony Gwynn win a third batting title? After all, the two leaders are kids (Montreal’s Andres Galarraga and Atlanta’s Gerald Perry) and the only veteran in his way appears to be the Dodgers’ Kirk Gibson.

“Oh yeah, I think Tony will win it,” pitcher Andy Hawkins said. “The guys ahead of him, they haven’t hit that much before. Tony’s got two months, right? He’ll win it.”

“I think he’ll take it,” Moreland added. “But, see, we all knew that.”

Maybe the question should not be will he win it but, when he does, will he enjoy it?

“I’m sorry,” Gwynn said, “but you can’t just flush my first three months down the toilet. A season is a season. And no matter what happens, this will not be a great season.”

Whatever he says. He’s the one batting .507. GWYNN’S HOT STREAK THROUGH JULY 1

AB H HR RBI Avg. 224 55 3 22 .246

NEXT 16 GAMES

AB H HR RBI Avg. 67 34 2 14 .507

CURRENT TOTALS

AB H HR RBI Avg. 291 89 5 36 .306