Strokes of an Artist : A More Mellow Gwynn Is Not Letting a Run at .400 Run His Life

Tony Gwynn is a man of rituals, a man of superstitions. He adheres to his pregame ritual with religious fervor. He charts his life the way one would a pitcher--charts the pitchers, too, to an extent that would appall most of them--and follows the plan to the letter. He believes the baseball axiom that a streak must be respected, that when a player is performing at peak ability, he should change nothing--not his stance, not the cereal he eats for breakfast.

Not that long ago, the Padres played Pittsburgh at home in a day game, and afterward Gwynn put a set of golf clubs in his trunk and drove out to a local course and played a round. It shocked his teammates. It shocked Gwynn. Tony, playing golf on a game day? Tony on the links, rather than breaking down a videotape?

v Three days later, Gwynn did it again. Another day game, another 18 holes. Then he went home and smiled at his wife, Alicia. Talked to his kids. And he felt better than he had in weeks.

“I think I finally realized something last week,” Gwynn said. “Sometimes, you can get so consumed playing the game of baseball. Being kind of in the range to make a run at .400 was driving me. I was letting that run my life more than me running my life. And it had gotten too hard.”

In his 15 seasons with the San Diego Padres, there is little that Gwynn has not learned about baseball. He can break down any pitcher in the National League, break down each of his pitches. He knows what hops a ball takes in the right field of every ballpark in the league. He knows the numbers, he knows the history, he knows--instinctively, in a way that never can be taught--how to predict what pitch he is about to be thrown.

What he didn’t know, until this, the most watched--and perhaps most difficult--season of his career, was how to walk away and just forget about baseball. It was a survival instinct that had escaped him, until he needed it to survive.

“When you play something for 15 years, you get comfortable,” Gwynn said. “But this has taken on a different kind of life all it’s own.”

Gwynn is hitting nearly .390. This is not unusual. He’s hit this well this late in the season various times in his career. In 1994, he was hitting .394 in mid-August when the strike ended the season. He’s won seven batting titles, and hit better than .300 every full season of his career. He’s won five Gold Gloves in right field. He has been an all-star 13 times.

And, for the most part, people had never gotten too excited about him. He never got chased down the street for autographs while on the road. He never made the cover of Sports Illustrated. In San Diego, he could take his kids to the mall and no one stopped him outside Pottery Barn and exclaimed, “Wow! You’re Tony Gwynn!” All that changed this year.

“I’ve been pretty consistent throughout my career,” Gwynn said. “And all the attention I got at the All-Star Game came as a shock. Most of the time, I’d be there, and people would come up to me and want me to talk about the other guys. This year, they were talking to the other guys about me.

“To be honest with you,” he added, “I really wasn’t comfortable. It took me a while to come to grips with it, even in this town.”

Gwynn stayed a secret (albeit not a well-kept one) because he plays in a small market, for a team that is better known for fire sales than for handing out big contracts, and that made the playoffs last fall for the first time in 12 years.

He stayed a secret because he’s the kind of player who winters in Indiana--yes, Indiana--in a small town outside Indianapolis where his wife has business interests. He stayed a secret because his name has never appeared on the news or in the newspapers for doing something illegal or outrageous. By contrast, Gwynn is, without question, one of the league’s greatest ambassadors, a man both thoughtful and well-spoken, with a heart so big it’s become legendary among San Diego fans.

Only Cal Ripken has played for the same team longer than Gwynn, who came up to the big leagues with the Padres in 1982, and never has left them, no matter how easy it would have been for him to sign contracts for bigger money in bigger cities with a bigger opportunity for national exposure. None of that mattered. He loved the Padres. They loved him back. And if the rest of the world barely noticed, well, Gwynn really did not care.

“I’ve never been a guy who has needed much attention,” Gwynn said. “I just play baseball. But all of a sudden, people seemed to realize that you’re a pretty good hitter, a pretty good player. I’ve always been compared to Wade Boggs, but he’s played in Boston, New York--much bigger markets.”

Why did it change this year? Why has Gwynn suddenly become everyone’s favorite interview, everyone’s favorite sound bite, the focus of a nationwide obsession with the number .400? That remains a mystery, a mystery that Gwynn has tried, and failed, to answer.

Perhaps, he thought, it is because of the other numbers he has amassed this season. At age 37, when most players are retired or, at the very least, on the downswing, Gwynn has compiled an uncharacteristic 96 runs batted in (his career best had been 90 in 1995) and 16 home runs (also a career best). Always one of baseball’s toughest batters to strike out, Gwynn is nearly on track to finish this season with more homers than K’s (he has whiffed 18 times).

All those numbers, though, are not what draws everyone’s attention. Case in point: While watching Gwynn take batting practice recently, one National League general manager was shocked when a casual observer mentioned that Gwynn’s RBI total had topped 90. The general manager hadn’t noticed. It’s just not the column on the statistics sheet that most--baseball people included--tend to check when they want to see what kind of year Gwynn is having.

“Face it, he’s having an MVP year,” said Padres Manager Bruce Bochy, who knows Gwynn quite well, having been his teammate from 1983 to ’87. “The scary thing is, as good as he was in the ‘80s, he’s gotten better. He hasn’t lost any hand-eye coordination. Maybe it’s fair to say he lost a step, but he’s gotten so much smarter as a hitter, knowing how they’re going to pitch him, that his overall game is just better than it’s ever been.”

Bochy recently skipped batting practice to watch his son graduate from high school; Gwynn likes to joke that he’s going to stay in this game so long that he’ll have to take a day off while he’s still a player to see Anthony II, his 14 year old, do the same in a few years. He still has some unfinished business in baseball. More than anything, he wants to make it back to the World Series, a dream he tasted in 1984. But this .400 thing, well, it’s starting to take on a life in his head as well.

Survey baseball players in clubhouses across both leagues, and the runaway majority will state that Gwynn is the most likely player to become baseball’s first .400 hitter since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. For a long time, Gwynn disagreed, insisting .400 was impossible.

But his attitude changed in 1994, when he added 13 points to his batting average between the All-Star break and the start of the strike and felt, deep in his heart, that he had what it took to reach the fabled plateau.

“It changed my mind in 1994,” Gwynn said. “I felt as if I was going to make a run, that that was going to be my year. But I really hadn’t thought about it again until this year.”

And Sports Illustrated showed up last month. On the cover of the June 28 issue, Gwynn was labeled the best hitter since Ted Williams. That concept makes Gwynn laugh, being the humble type he is. He wouldn’t mind, though, getting a chance to stand next to Williams, atop the .400 plateau.