Call Him Mr. Padre : Baseball: Tony Gwynn, one of the sport’s better hitters, is not your average superstar.

Tony Gwynn had just come into his house one recent afternoon when he flicked on the TV set, scanned a few of the hundreds of channels that his satellite dish provides and then started screaming.

“I started flipping the channels, and I caught the big press conference just as everybody was walking in,” Gwynn said. “There was the baseball commissioner (Fay Vincent), Don Fehr, (Chuck) O’Connor, and cameras and reporters everywhere. I started yelling, ‘Alicia, Alicia, come here. This is it. It’s over. It’s over. We’re playing baseball.’ ”

Alicia, Gwynn’s wife, came running into the sunken living room to see the cause of all this commotion.

“Let’s start packing, Alicia, they’re going to end this thing right now,” Gwynn yelled. “We’re going to Yuma. We’re going to Yuma.”

Before Gwynn began to pull everything out of his dresser drawers to pack for the Padres’ spring training camp, he decided to stick around for a moment and watch this rousing conclusion to baseball’s lockout. After all, he had already waited three weeks; what’s a few more minutes?

“I couldn’t believe it,” Gwynn said. “All of a sudden, I went from the feeling I had when we had our kids to the bottom of the barrel. It was the pits.

“I think Alicia felt like crying right along with me.”

Instead of the commencement of spring training, the press conference revealed that the long winter was only going to get longer.

Sure, baseball fans can go ahead and keep on thinking that they’re the only ones suffering from spring training depression, saying how they could not care less now if owners and players choke on their greed.

But then again, there’s a good chance that those same folks have never met Gwynn.

“What hurts the most is the sitting and the waiting,” Gwynn says. “Right now, my whole day centers around ESPN, just waiting for the 4 o’clock show to see how negotiations are progressing.

“I never thought I’d say this, but right now, I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm. I just don’t even feel like working out because I don’t know when I’m going to camp. The fire’s just not there.

“When I get up in the morning each day, I think, ‘Should I work out? Should I spend my time with my family? Or should I go see how our new house is coming?’

“You know, I guess that’s why I wouldn’t be the right guy for the union, because I’d just do something so we could go ahead and play baseball.

“Man, this is tough.”

At a time when baseball’s public image is crumbling by the day, with the average salary soaring faster than the cost of housing in Southern California, with rehab clinics becoming as popular as Club Med vacations and paternity suits more common than traffic tickets, there is Anthony Keith Gwynn.

Go ahead and call him Tony.

If America needs a hero, take a good, hard look at this guy.

Yeah, that’s him. You look at his silhouette, and you wonder what this guy’s doing playing in the same profession as the Bo Jacksons and Dave Winfields of the world. Babe Ruth proved you don’t have to be a candidate for Michelangelo’s chisel, but when you look at Gwynn’s physique--5-feet-11, 210 pounds--it’s difficult to believe you’re looking at perhaps the finest hitter in the game.

“When I go on the road, nobody knows who I am,” Gwynn said. “The only time people think I might be somebody is when I’m walking onto the team bus. But even then, I hear people saying to me, ‘Hey, Garry Templeton. Hey, Bip Roberts.’ No one outside San Diego knows who I am.”

Of course, when you’re wearing tennis shoes, jeans, an open shirt, with no gold chains, carrying a brief case, it’s little wonder autograph seekers think you’re the club’s traveling secretary.

“I’m just an average guy,” said Gwynn, who just a month ago purchased a ’75 Volkswagen bug. “I don’t stick out like everyone else.

“But really, even people who know me, really don’t know me. They know me at the ballpark, and things like that, but I don’t think people really know what I’m all about.”

Even most of Gwynn’s teammates really don’t know him outside the clubhouse or the baseball field. When the Padres traded away Greg Booker last June, Gwynn lost his last remaining close friend on the club.

It’s hard to find too many guys on the road these days whose greatest pleasure after games is to head back to the hotel room, order a pizza, call the family and sit back in bed and watch movies or past games on a videotape.

“We never needed much to entertain us,” said Booker, who is now with the Chicago Cubs organization. “We’d just go back to the room and talk and rent a movie. Oh, sometimes we’d play cards, but that was about it as far as excitement.”

Said Gwynn: “Every now and then, I’ll go downstairs and have a beer, but I’ll always bring it right back upstairs. Guys talk about needing a beer after a game. Hey, if I need one that bad, I can go to room service and get one.

“If I want to get boxed, and I’ll admit I occasionally do, I’ll do it in my room and not bother anybody. Why make a fool of yourself in front of everyone? I don’t have to hang around downstairs in the hotel bar just to feel like a part of the team.”

So, what happens when you get, uh, boxed?

“Well, it takes all of about two beers,” Gwynn said, “and then I go right to sleep.”

Apparently, no one has told Gwynn that a four-time batting champion with a career batting average of .332 isn’t supposed to be acting this way.

He’s supposed to tell reporters to shove off, not be the most accessible guy on the team.

He’s supposed to tell autograph-seekers to meet him at card shows, not sign them before and after every game for free.

He’s supposed to tell the media how he doesn’t read the papers and refuses to listen to sportscasters talk about him, not subscribe to four local daily newspapers and listen to the talk shows each night.

He’s supposed to be rude, obnoxious and arrogant, not act as if he’s a rookie trying to make his first big league team.

“You know, it might sound crazy,” Booker said, “but he’s the exact same person he was when we were riding the back of the bus together at Walla Walla, making $600 a month.

“He and his wife might be the most down-to-earth, good people I’ve ever known.”

Said Chris Gwynn, his younger brother, who plays in the Dodger organization: “He’s nothing but a little kid. I tell him that all of the time. He’s got the same friends he had in college. He’s never going to change. I don’t care how many batting titles he wins.”

Said teammate Bip Roberts: “The thing about Tony, it’s not an act or anything like that. He’s genuine. He’ll speak his mind, and speak straight from the heart.”

Joe Carter, one of the newest Padres who has known Gwynn since 1980: “I really don’t think Tony will ever change. He’s a special person. Now, if I can only get him interested in a couple of my basketball video games.”

Gwynn hears the praise, the compliments and knows he’s an easy target for every Padre public relations function that needs attending, but he laughs when he hears this talk of being flawless.

“Hey, I’m not perfect by any means,” he argues. “I curse, I dip (tobacco), I break bats when I’m mad, I do things other people do.

“It’s not like I’ve never gotten a traffic ticket or anything.”

OK, so when was the last ticket you received?

“Well, let me see, it was in ‘86, no, maybe ’85. I was speeding. Oh, I know, I was pulled over a few months ago because my fog lights were on and the police thought my high beams were on. I didn’t get a ticket though, just a warning.”

Now you can begin to understand why Gwynn might be the best-kept secret in Corporate America. But this suddenly appears to be changing.

It’s incredible to John Boggs, Gwynn’s agent, that it has taken this long for Gwynn to be discovered in the world of commercials and endorsements. He’s intelligent, articulate, personable, and his baseball feats are outrageous, but there has always been one constant flaw.

Gwynn plays for the Padres and lives in San Diego.

And to most in Corporate America, San Diego is known as that area that’s located somewhere between Japan and the desert.

“Could you imagine if he played in Los Angeles, or New York,” said Dick Graeber, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the regional Pepsi-Cola office. “People would go bonkers. Geez, if he was doing what he is for the Padres for the Dodgers, Yankees or Mets, it would be unbelievable.

“He’s really a hidden treasure.”

Gwynn has never been in a national commercial and until 1987 had never even been in any local advertisements. Of course, his integrity also has something to do with this.

When Boggs excitedly telephoned Gwynn a month ago to inform him that Pepsi-Cola wanted him to endorse a drink called Mountain Dew Sport, Gwynn had just one response.

“He wanted to taste it,” Boggs said. “It didn’t matter what kind of money they were going to pay him, if he didn’t like the taste, he wasn’t going to endorse it.

“That’s Tony. He knows his credibility is on the line, and believe me, we’ve turned down several things just because Tony doesn’t believe in it.”

Three months ago, when Gwynn was filming a commercial for a batting machine, the producer asked if he would drink a certain beverage while standing by the machine.

Uh-uh. It might have helped project the All-American image, Gwynn said, but he wasn’t about to be seen with a drink he doesn’t even like.

The Home Shopper’s Network also called, asking him to appear for an hour on their show, making easy money while hawking baseball memorabilia. Everyone seems to be doing it. Pete Rose has been a virtual regular on the program and Hall of Famers have also been guests.

Not Gwynn.

“He doesn’t believe in that,” Boggs said.

There have been plenty of other capitalistic ventures that Gwynn has turned down, some literally because of his fear of flying.

He has no choice during the baseball season, of course, and actually his teammates prove to be enough of a distraction so that he doesn’t think about being 40,000 feet in the air. But when he’s on his own, he’d much rather drive or take a train, thank you very much.

It happened in the fall of 1984, just after the World Series. Gwynn was making a quick appearance in Visalia and that evening took a flight from Oakland back home.

“I still remember it like it happened yesterday,” Gwynn said. “I was sitting in the third row on the left side. We had a normal takeoff and everything was going fine. The guy next to me had just dropped down his tray table to do some work, and I was reading.

“Then, all of a sudden, we just started dropping and dropping and dropping. People started screaming and yelling. I thought this was it, something was wrong with the plane.

“By the time we stopped dropping, the guy next to me had me in a headlock. He apologized, and I said to him, ‘Hey, if you hadn’t done it to me, I would have done it to you.’

“Just about when we were going to land, the pilot finally told us that we were headed for a mid-air collision, and that’s why he did that.

“Well, ever since that, I’ve been shaky. Real shaky. When I’m with the team, it’s not too bad, but as soon as I feel that first bump, I’m grabbing onto the arm rests.”

The only other incident in Gwynn’s life that scared him more occurred on May 22, 1987.

It happened at 4:59 that afternoon. Gwynn said that for as long as he lives, he’ll never be able to escape the emotional scar.

It was the day that he filed for bankruptcy.

Case No. 8703735.

There were 44 creditors asking for $1,230,417.17.

Gwynn had only $690,150, leaving him more than $540,000 in debt.

“It was the most humiliating experience of my life,” Gwynn said. “I lost a lot of money and a lot of nights’ sleep over that. And I took an awful lot of public ridicule.

“I think people anyway have the perception of athletes having furs and cars and jewelry, and now here’s a guy who wasn’t smart enough to handle his money.

“I got a lot of hate mail, even some threats. I remember one guy, I’ll never forget his name, wrote me this one letter ripping me apart. It had racist things in it and everything. And the thing about it, the guy signed his name with his address, phone number and everything.

“I was so mad I called the operator, just to see if the name and phone number matched up. It didn’t. You know, I really wanted to explain to the guy what happened. Of course, if I ever saw him, I’d probably kick him from here to Montana.”

Simply, Gwynn was a victim of trust, and perhaps naivete. Gwynn didn’t even bother knowing the details of his investments, and trusted his agent, Lew Muller, a San Diego-based attorney, to such an extent that he gave him complete power of attorney.

Muller, contacted in his El Cajon office, said: “I’d rather not rehash anything. I’d like to leave it in the past, as I’m sure Tony would.”

Gwynn said he started to become suspicious in early 1987 when several banks started calling him on loans made to Muller. Payments were not being made. Since Gwynn was a co-signer, he was responsible. Once he realized the trouble he was in, he went over to Muller’s home, took the Mercedes Benz for which he had co-signed and never contacted him again.

At about this same time, Muller was being sued for $3 million by former Charger linebacker Mike Douglass. The charge: misrepresentation and fraud.

“I don’t know why,” Alicia Gwynn said, “but I knew it was coming. I tried to warn Tony, but he thought I just didn’t like Lew. The thing was, there were just so many holes, so many holes. He had Tony wrapped around his finger. You couldn’t tell Tony anything, though, because he had so much trust in him.”

Said Tony Gwynn: “You hire a guy, and you trust him, and three years later you find that he’s taken you every wrong direction,” Gwynn said. “I really wanted to get out of it myself, but I was so deep in debt, filing for bankruptcy was the only way out.

“We tried to be real slick about it, so reporters wouldn’t find out, so we filed at 4:59 on a Friday. Well, right before the game, some reporter comes in, huffing and puffing, and asked me if I filed.

“I said, ‘Well, obviously you know or you wouldn’t have been running to my locker.’

“I guess I could have hid, but I faced it all, every bit of it.”

It was Alicia, the woman who lived down the street from Tony growing up, and was his childhood sweetheart long before high school, who convinced him to file for bankruptcy. The decision was not so much for their sake, Alicia said, as it was for their two kids, Anthony (7) and Anisha (4).

“If we kept trying to pay off all of our debts,” Alicia said, “we would have been paying them off forever. We have children we have to think about, and their future was bleak.

“Tony kept worrying about me, but it was only hard in the sense that I had to hold Tony up, because I knew he couldn’t get through it himself. And he kept worrying about what people were saying and thinking. I said, ‘Tony, this was something that was done to us, we didn’t cause this.’ ”

These days, things are different. Gwynn knows exactly where every dollar is going. His wife is his business manager. His best friend, Boggs, is his agent.

“I’m not sure he’ll ever get over it,” Boggs said. “I think it will always be with him. Tony is a very proud man. The thing that hurt him the most was that he placed so much trust and confidence in someone, and he ended up taking the brunt of it.

“The only good thing that came out of it was that he’s young in his earning potential, and he learned a valuable lesson. Now, he’s very hands-on. He asks questions. Everything, whether it be good, bad or indifferent, is run past him.

But you want to know the craziest part of the whole episode?

Gwynn never filed charges or even a lawsuit against Muller.

“We talked about it,” Boggs said, “and he told me, ‘What’s that going to accomplish now? The guy’s got nothing. So we send him to jail, so what? The guy’s got a family, and I just can’t do that to his family.’

“Can you believe it?”

It’s because of this same loyalty and trust that Gwynn is so hurt by his contractual situation with the Padres. He’s making $1 million this season, which according to the Player Relations Committee, will rank him behind about 150 players, including six of his teammates.

Sure, Gwynn knows he made the original mistake by signing a six-year, $4.5 million contract in 1984, which became outdated two years later. And he compounded it by accepting a two-year, $4 million option in February 1988, that will pay him $2 million in 1991 and $2 million in 1992. The Padres have 15 days after the 1990 World Series to exercise the 1992 option.

But considering what he has done for the organization, and that teammate Joe Carter is being paid $9.2 million over the next three seasons, why, he asks, should he be held to a contract that he has clearly outperformed.

“I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t get by with what they’re paying me now,” Gwynn said. “Of course I can get by. A million dollars is a lot of money. And the bankruptcy has nothing to do with this. I’m back on my feet now.

“But I just want to be fair about this. I’ve never once asked for a renegotiation. They gave some money ($500,000) in ’87 for what I did in the past, but it wasn’t a handout, it was for my previous services.

“Really, there’s nothing I can do about it now. Hopefully, if I do my job, I’ll be rewarded. If not, I’m not going to sit and pout about it. That’s not my nature. I understand a contract’s a contract, so what can I do?”

Jerry Kapstein, who oversees the Padre operations, said that he and Padre owner Joan Kroc contacted Gwynn and Boggs last Saturday in a conference call to discuss Gwynn’s contract for the first time. They talked for 45 minutes, but nothing changed. The Padres will continue to hold Gwynn to the same contract, and don’t plan talking again until it’s time for another.

“The reluctance for them to do something is mind-boggling to me,” Boggs said. “I’m just hoping that one day, they wake up and say, ‘My God, what are we doing here? This is Tony Gwynn. This is Mr. Padre. Let’s be fair to him.’ ”

Gwynn’s contract situation has made even a few of his teammates uncomfortable with their own. The night that Benito Santiago won a $1.25 million arbitration award, after only three years of big-league service, he apologized for making more than Gwynn. Carter, who’s one of Gwynn’s closest friends, even had a talk with him to make sure there were no hard feelings.

“Tony was a little upset at my contract, not at me, but with the organization,” Carter said. “I just told him there’s no way that I am better than he is, because he’s one of the best players in the big leagues. I just happened to come along at the right time, that’s all.

“If I had the opportunity to sign a long-term contract when he did, I’m sure I would have done the same thing. But no one gave me that chance.”

There has been speculation that Gwynn’s annoyance with his contract will only further increase his desire to excel this season, to show management up, but those who know him laugh at such talk.

Gwynn could be making $4.25 an hour, his friends say, and he’d still be at the stadium at 2 o’clock every afternoon taking extra batting practice and studying videotapes at home after games.

“He puts as much effort into the game as anyone I’ve ever seen,” said Padre Manager Jack McKeon, who has been around the game for the 40 years. “Do you know who he reminds me of? Brooks Robinson. Brooks was the best third baseman in the game, and there he was every day, taking 100 ground balls before each game.

“That’s Tony, he just doesn’t go out there and make it happen, he works his butt off. He puts so much pressure on himself to do well that you never have to say a word to him, and he just rubs off on everybody else.”

Gwynn, who became the first National League player since Stan Musial in 1950-52 to win three consecutive batting titles, also laughed at talk of any further incentives. Sure, one day he’d like to make a run at .400, knowing that it would secure immortality. Yeah, and he’d sure like to win a Most Valuable Player award before his career ends.

“But what I want, more than anything else, is a World Series ring,” he said. “I want to be able to flash my ring like the other guys, show off with it.”

Gwynn hesitated a moment, thought about what he just said, and laughed hysterically as if he just heard God’s first joke.

“Well, knowing me, I wouldn’t even wear it, but it sure would be fun having it around the house, you know?”