Tony Gwynn
May 9, 1960 — June 16, 2014 — Los Angeles / San Diego, California
Tony Gwynn was a San Diego Padres outfielder whose extraordinary bat control produced a career .338 batting average, eight NL batting titles, and a near-.400 season in 1994 — achievements that earned him a reputation as the greatest pure hitter of his era and one of the greatest in the history of baseball.
Origin of an Obsession
Born on May 9, 1960, in Los Angeles, Anthony Keith Gwynn grew up in Long Beach and excelled in both baseball and basketball at college — he was drafted by the San Diego Padres in baseball and the San Diego Clippers in basketball on the same day in 1981. He chose baseball. After a brief minor league stint he joined the Padres permanently in 1982, and within two seasons had announced himself as something exceptional. Gwynn was fanatical about studying his own swing and opponent pitchers on videotape — a practice he adopted before most players and coaches took video analysis seriously. He wore out VHS tapes rewinding his at-bats, and his attention to mechanical detail was unusual in an era when most hitters trusted instinct.
Eight Batting Titles and the .394 Year
Gwynn won his first batting title in 1984 with a .351 average and collected seven more over the following decade — leading the NL in four consecutive seasons from 1987 to 1990. His singular achievement came in the strike-shortened 1994 season, when a players' strike ended the season on August 12. At that point Gwynn was batting .394 — the closest any player had come to hitting .400 since Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941. In the 1998 World Series, facing Roger Clemens — who had struck out the previous fifteen batters he faced — Gwynn hit a first-pitch fastball off the center field wall for a single, prompting Clemens to tip his cap in the dugout. He was the first player Clemens had faced that Series who actually hit him hard.
Did You Know?
Tony Gwynn famously said that Ted Williams was the only hitter he ever truly studied obsessively — he read Williams's book The Science of Hitting so many times the pages fell out. When the two met, Williams peppered Gwynn with questions about his mechanics and reportedly told him that of all the hitters he had watched, Gwynn had the best strike zone judgment he had ever seen in a left-handed hitter. Gwynn called it the greatest compliment he ever received.
Coach, Hall of Famer, and Legacy
Gwynn retired after the 2001 season with 3,141 hits and a .338 career average. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007 in his first year of eligibility, receiving votes on 97.6% of ballots. He spent his post-playing career coaching baseball at San Diego State University, where he had attended. He was diagnosed with salivary gland cancer in 2010, which he publicly attributed to decades of chewing tobacco, and he became an advocate for anti-tobacco campaigns among athletes. He died on June 16, 2014, at fifty-four. The Padres retired his number 19, and Tony Gwynn Drive in San Diego is named in his honor.