Gwynn Can Become Champion in Dugout

Have a conundrum. A paradox, if you will.

How can a guy who bats .324 for the season be declared the batting champion for a league when another player in it batted .330?

Easy, when you understand that some of baseball’s rules seem to come right out of the fertile imagination of Lewis Carroll and are administered by the Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

In baseball’s Wonderland, the situation was this: Willie McGee of the St. Louis Cardinals was leading the National League in batting at .335 on Aug. 29 of last year when he was traded to the American League’s Oakland A’s.

At Oakland, he hit .274 for the last month, pulling his season mark down to .324.

Back in the National League, the Dodgers’ Eddie Murray was finishing up his season at .330. But that’s nothing. The Mets’ Dave Magadan was finishing at .328 and the Phillies’ Lenny Dykstra at .325. You will notice that all three batted higher than Willie McGee for the season. But McGee was the league batting champion. Even though he wasn’t in it and finished up in arrears of three batters in that league.

Figure that one out. And bring the answer in for Monday.

The trick here is, Willie McGee had the obligatory 502 plate appearances at St. Louis at the time of the trade to qualify for the batting title. He could have gone hitless for Oakland in September and still won the NL title.

Actually, his 501 official at-bats plus 38 bases on balls more than satisfied the league requirements.

The batting title rules used to require 400 official at-bats. Period. Sacrifice flies, bunts and walks didn’t count. Under baseball rules, those are non-at-bats.

The rule was changed in 1954. That was the year in which Ted Williams returned from the Korean War--his second war--and batted .345, or four points more than the .341 average of the official American League champion, Bobby Avila.

Williams had only 386 official at-bats that year, 14 short of the requirement. But he had been walked a league-leading 136 times. (He regularly led the league in walks with 160 or 150 or 140 and is second only to Babe Ruth in lifetime bases on balls.)

It was so palpably unfair to deprive a man of a batting championship because the pitchers wouldn’t pitch to him that the rule was amended the next year to provide that 502 plate appearances--including walks, sacrifice flies, bunts and hit-by-pitches--were enough to satisfy the decimal demons of the grand old game. Thus in 1990, you had the dichotomous spectacle of a non-member winning a league batting championship. In absentia, as it were.

This is of some contemporary history because, for the second year in a row, a league batting championship could conceivably be won by a guy who batted zero in that league over the last weeks of the season.

Anthony K. Gwynn of the San Diego Padres could become the second player in two years to win the league title without swinging in that league for the last several weeks of the season.

Now, Tony Gwynn is a very great hitter. In only seven full seasons in the big leagues, he has won four batting championships. He flirted with .400 most of one year (1987) when he batted .473 for June and settled on .370, highest for the league since Stan Musial.

He strikes out about every eclipse of the moon. Pitchers swear he could get a bat on a passing bullet. When he’s on, he wears out left field. You can always tell Tony Gwynn’s been in town by the divots along the left-field foul line. He entered the season with a career average of .329, tied with Honus Wagner, no less.

If any player was entitled to win his fifth batting crown, it would be Tony Gwynn.

But what if--for the second year in a row--the batting title in the league was won by a guy without a bat on his shoulder in that league?

At the close of business Tuesday night, Tony Gwynn was only one percentage point behind the batting race’s leaders, Cincinnati’s Hal Morris and Atlanta’s Terry Pendleton.

They’re still in the lineup. Tony’s season ground to an end last month when packages of torn and loose cartilage in his left knee found him in such pain--”Bone was rubbing up against bone,” he recalls--that he was unable to push off on his back foot. His average tumbled dramatically until the doctors finally took him out of the lineup and operated.

Still hobbled, Tony finds himself in a position to win the batting title in the dugout. “I didn’t make the rules,” he laughs. “I’ve got the plate appearances (564).”

He adds: “I’ve won the batting championship (four times) at the plate. I wish Morris and Pendleton a lot of luck. They’re both good hitters, but if they don’t beat .317, they don’t win. It’s up to them. They know what they have to do.”

The point is, Gwynn has paid his dues. Only 31, he is, in fact, in a position to equal or better Honus Wagner’s total of eight batting championships.

Oddly enough, it’s not highest on Tony’s list of priorities at the plate.

“What I’d really like to do,” he explains, “is get 3,000 hits. That is one goal I shoot for.” It’s a tall order. Gwynn has 1,699 hits. To reach his goal, he would have to have seven 200-hit years or their equivalent. It’s not impossible: Gwynn has had more than 200 hits in a season four times.

Plate appearances are no problem for the free-swinging Gwynn. He has had seasons with more than 700 plate appearances. “Let’s say I’m aggressive at the plate,” he smiles. He walks just a bit more often than he fans.

He considers another milestone unattainable--the .400 season. “It will take an extraordinary human being to handle the media rush which comes at you,” he says. “The distractions are major, and hitting .400 requires all the concentration you can bring. You also have to get more bases on balls than I do. I’m not Ted Williams up there. Williams walked more in a month than I do in a year.”

To Tony Gwynn, hitting is a science of consistency, but it’s also like an art form in that it defies precision. “Sometimes a pitch that isn’t quite a strike is easier for me to hit than one that is a strike,” he says. A Ted Williams might pass up a hittable pitch, a Tony Gwynn will try to larrup it into the opposite field. “Ted wanted a pitch he could pull. I might just want one I could punch,” Gwynn says.

There are some who suspect that Tony Gwynn will make a dramatic 11th-hour return to the lineup in a final game to attempt to wrest one more batting title on the field, but Gwynn shakes his head. “I’m not that healed,” he explains.

If he wins the title, he’ll be entitled. He won the championship by 30 points in 1984, by 32 in 1987 and was in 157, 158 and 158 (out of 162) games in three of his championship years. And to be sure, if he does win, he’ll still be in the same uniform and the same league--and his batting average will be for his whole season, not just a part of it.