Padres’ Gwynn Records a No. 1 Hit : He Passes Winfield on Career List During Split With Braves

Tony Gwynn, who likes his baseball plain, no sauce, no pickles, couldn’t have ordered a better way in which to step into Padre history.

An autumn Saturday night in the South. Georgia football on the radio, puddles on the ground, smoky fog in the air, about 1,000 witnesses in the stands.

At 7:19 p.m. against Atlanta pitcher Jim Acker, Gwynn stepped to the plate and about five people clapped. A couple of others conversed. Nobody watched.

Two pitches later, he slapped at a sinker. The ball drifted through the haze and landed softly in shallow right field. A single, and while you could have heard a pin drop, Tony Gwynn didn’t care, because it wasn’t a pin that dropped.

It was a record. Meet your all-time Padre hit leader.

Gwynn’s RBI hit was the 1,135th in his six-year Padre career, passing Dave Winfield with as much fanfare as Gwynn requires. The game wasn’t stopped. Gwynn didn’t smile. Four pitches later, he scored on Carmelo Martinez’s homer and life went on. Gwynn added a single in the second game of this doubleheader.

“What is hitting, anyway?” Gwynn asked later. “It’s you. It’s the pitcher. It’s the catcher. It’s the umpire. That’s all there is.”

It’s when other things get into the act that baseball becomes complicated, as it was Saturday in your textbook September meeting between the two worst teams in the division. After what seemed like 17 hours, the Padres had split, winning the first game, 9-4, and losing the second, 6-3, in front of a paid crowd of 4,224 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Gwynn set his record in the first game. In the second, the Braves made a season-high six errors and the Padres still lost.

After the first game, Manager Jack McKeon savored Gwynn’s record long enough to say, “Ahh, nice record, but he’ll surpass this one by plenty. I think it will be a bigger deal when he passes Pete Rose.”

Gwynn savored his record long to say, “It’s only a step--a first step on a longer trip.”

A trip to where?

“Everybody would like to get 3,000 hits,” Gwynn said. “That’s where I’m heading.”

And after that? Pete Rose and 4,256?

“The way I figure it,” Gwynn said with a smile, “I’ll be an old, old, old man before I make a run at that record.”

As it is, the 28-year-old Gwynn was lucky he could count to 1,134. That was Winfield’s record, which he tied in the third inning with an RBI triple off Braves starter Pete Smith. Gwynn had reached the mark in 570 fewer at-bats than Winfield, but it took some head-swiveling on third base before he realized he was there.

“All of a sudden I see them throwing the ball out, and I think, oh yeah, I’ve tied it,” Gwynn said.

That ball will join the other ball on the desk of a former Padre secretary, who with a black pen will stencil in the place and time and pitcher, and then encase the ball in plastic and send it to Gwynn. It will then join the other balls on a shelf in Gwynn’s home, balls such as his first hit, his first homer, his 200th hits, his 1,000 hit.

“It’s kind of nice to have them up there,” he said. “They look real nice.”

Sort of like that Acker pitch in the seventh, which Gwynn will be forever pleased that he poked for a legitimate single. That’s because his 1,000th hit, earlier this year against Houston’s Nolan Ryan, was a fly ball lost in the lights. Gwynn remembers those things.

“Tonight I saw the ball clean and hit it clean, and that’s what made me happy,” Gwynn said, adding, “I didn’t want any official scorer having to give me this one.”

As often happens around Gwynn, underneath the happiness there was irony. Both the tying the record-breaking hits were accompanied by an RBI, highlighting the one aspect of Gwynn’s game that is still hiding out. Everyone knows he can hit, but nobody has seen him consistently get the big hits. Incidentally, Saturday’s two RBIs give him 64, just seven shy of his career high of 71 in 1984.

“First of all, Tony is never in a position to drive in runs,” McKeon said. “Put him with more guys on base in front of him, he can knock in runs.”

Admitted Gwynn before Saturday’ game: “That’s one thing I want to be known more for. A run producer.”

After Saturday, he was known as something else, namely a guy who plays hurt. Or should that be, a guy who plays hurt because he is scared to death of 12-inch needles.

Whatever, Gwynn decided before this weekend that his swollen left hand will be left unattended. No surgery. Not even a cortisone shot.

“I don’t want to go through the pain of a shot and then the bother of having to miss three more games to recover from the shot,” said Gwynn, who was removed from the lineup for three games just last week because of the hand, with some even speculating he would not return the rest of the season.

“No, I’m back, and I’m going to stay back,’ Gwynn said. “The hand feels the same, but I’m just going to live with it. I’m not going to have surgery, either, because nobody is convinced it would do any good.

“This winter I’ll rest it a couple of months and then start again next year.”

Along these same lines, give an assist to Greg Booker, whom Gwynn summoned to the batting cage before Friday rainout here after he had made his decision to finish the season. He wanted to regain his batting eye for the rest of the year, and he figured the best way to do it would be off the dipping and darting pitches of Booker.

“You bat against him, you are forced to see,” Gwynn said. “You’ve got to watch the ball out of the hand, and you’ve got to react.”

For 10 minutes in a steamy room below the stadium, standing 60 feet apart in a tiny cage, Booker threw his best stuff and Gwynn took his best hacks.

Then came Saturday, and don’t look now, but he is still leading the National League batting race with a .308 average, percentage points ahead of Atlanta’s Gerald Perry.

“I had my best hacks of the year on Friday,” Gwynn said. “If I swing like this the rest of the way, I got a chance at the title.”

“I’m betting on it,” McKeon said of what would be Gwynn’s third and most unlikely title. “He gets two hits here, two hits there, that’s all he needs.”

By the way, Gwynn now needs 1,864 to reach 3,000. Don’t laugh. With Tony Gwynn, 3,000 will be here before you know it.

Padre Notes

The Padres won the first game thanks not just to Gwynn but also to two RBIs each from Roberto Alomar and Carmelo Martinez, whose two-run homer was his 15th. Starter Eric Show allowed two runs in six innings, and then was conveniently removed with a 7-2 lead after throwing just 64 pitches. This means he should be able to return for the second game of Wednesday’s doubleheader in Los Angeles, a game that reliever Greg Booker had been tentatively scheduled to start. “I was feeling kind of tired and beat, and we thought I could leave and be able to come back Wednesday,” Show said. “It was fine with me.” . . . The Padres lost the second game because they surrounded the Braves’ errors with several blown scoring opportunities.

PADRE HIT LEADER Tony Gwynn . . . 1,136

Dave Winfield . .1,134

Gene Richards . . .994

Garry Templeton . .858

Terry Kennedy . . .817

Nate Colbert . . . 780

Clarence Gaston . .672

Steve Garvey . . . 631

Tim Flannery . . . 595

Luis Salazar . . . 532