Tape-Measure Shots Made Gwynn Great

He may be the first video junkie headed to the Hall of Fame. Tony Gwynn doesn’t dispute it. In fact, he believes it may be the reason he was able to play 20 years in the big leagues and produce a career that will take him to Cooperstown in 2007. He also believes that his dedication to repeated study of his swing and opposing pitchers may have changed the way hitters and pitchers prepare.

Miss the game? How could he when all he has to do is plug a tape into his VCR to watch any or all of his 3,124 hits?

“I’m one of the few guys who can retire with every hit on video,” he said at the Thursday news conference where he announced he would retire at the end of the season.

“I’ll never be that far away. If I have the urge to go back and look, I can. I had a game plan and stuck with it. I did things people said were unusual and different. They called me Captain Video and other things, but I knew [all of that research and study] made me a better player, and now every team has a video guy and video equipment. I owe Sony a lot. Without that stuff I don’t know if I’d be here.”

Gwynn might have made it look easy at times, but don’t believe it.

“Tony wanted to be the best, worked at it, and was the best,” San Diego Padre General Manager Kevin Towers said. “You could have brought him up from the Appalachian League and he would have arrived with information on the opposing pitcher that night. There’s no way to bluff him out of a poker game, and it’s never mattered what a pitcher threw him because he was prepared. You couldn’t fool him.

“I know [Manager Bruce Bochy] relied on him at times to get the pulse of the clubhouse, and he was like a sounding board for me, having another scout around. I even used to bounce trades off him. I mean, I’ve utilized him a lot that way, and probably would continue to if he’s coaching nearby.”

Towers referred to Gwynn’s interest in becoming the baseball coach at San Diego State, his alma mater, when Jim Dietz retires in June 2002.

San Diego State President Stephen Weber, while praising Gwynn as a civic treasure in an interview with Tony Perry of The Times, said no decision has been made on a coach and that Athletic Director Rick Bay is responsible for making it.

“Rick and I have an agreement: He doesn’t make curriculum decisions and I don’t hire coaches,” Weber said with a laugh.

Other civic leaders, however, have begun an unofficial “Hire Gwynn” movement, stressing that Gwynn could help the school become a baseball power by attracting top-level high school players.

“There is no reason that San Diego State, with Tony Gwynn as coach, can’t compete with [any perennial power],” said George Mitrovich, a baseball booster and founder of the City Club of San Diego, a public affairs forum.

Chipper Jones, the Atlanta Brave third baseman, and John Rocker, his former teammate and now Cleveland Indian closer, may have agreed to an uneasy gag rule in their lively sniping, but that doesn’t mean the Braves aren’t delighted to be free of Rocker. In fact, reliable witnesses say Manager Bobby Cox was doing the tomahawk chop in the clubhouse on the night Rocker was traded. Then again, he may have been celebrating another victory during a month in which the Braves, still struggling offensively, finally regained a measure of their division-dominating form.

They began the weekend 18-8 for June, picking up eight games on the Philadelphia Phillies to forge a tie for the East lead. The Phillies? Atlanta outfielder Brian Jordan stoked the fire, saying they lacked that “one leader to round up the troops and get them together. It was just a matter of time.”

Perhaps, but the Phillies swept a doubleheader from the challenging Florida Marlins on Thursday and won again Friday to regain the lead, all of that after a leader named Larry Bowa gathered the troops for a Wednesday clubhouse meeting in which he didn’t spare words. Bowa, of course, has been trying to show he has mellowed from his first managerial implosion with the Padres 13 years ago. Sometimes he’s successful and sometimes he isn’t.