A modern major league stadium, such as Jack Murphy, is a complex edifice containing many surprises in its nooks and crannies. On Opening Day, 1989, 19 skunks were evicted from it. It is a very Nineties place. Sushi is served at one of the food stands and there are diapering tables in the men’s as well as women’s rest rooms. Deep beneath the stands there is a clean, well-lit room that was prepared by the Padres to satisfy Gwynn, who asked for it for several seasons. It is a long, narrow batting room, big enough for a pitcher’s mound at regulation distance from a plate, and an “Iron Mike” pitching machine with a capacity for about 250 baseballs. The room is lit at 300 candle feet, exactly as the Jack Murphy field is lit, so a player expecting to pinch-hit can come to the room during a game to take practice swings. This afternoon Gwynn is trying to wear it out—the machine and the netting that captures the batted balls. He also is wearing out several Padres relief pitchers who have not been used much in recent games and do not mind satisfying—well, trying to satisfy—Gwynn’s voracious appetite for pitches to hit.
The Padres did Gwynn’s family a favor by building the batting cage. Gwynn has been known to show up at a social event with a batting glove hanging out of his hip pocket, having stopped somewhere on the way for some swings. Around midnight after a San Diego game a few years ago, one of Gwynn’s associates at the San Diego School of Baseball was driving by the building where the school’s pitching machines are and was annoyed to see the lights on. Assuming that some kids had neglected to turn them off, he stopped to do so. Inside he found Gwynn standing in his street clothes, with a paper cup between his feet so he could swing and spit at the same time without making tobacco stains on the floor, taking some swings before heading home. With the new batting room at the Stadium, the Padres and Mrs. Gwynn and his son and daughter at least know where he is when he is not at home.
During the first days of the 1989 season, Gwynn spent so much time using the new batting room (he went there for extra hitting after the opening night game) that a teammate said, “He wants the hits to land and spin a certain way.” The room is not a restful place to be. The pitching machine, with its cranking, clanking arm, is noisy. The crack of the bat on the ball, so pleasant in the open air, is a jarring concussion in the concrete enclosure. Baseball’s violence—the slash of the ball on a tight arc toward the plate, the ricochet of the ball off the bat—is intensified in the glare and confinement of the room. But a teammate who is waiting to hit provides a softening musical background.
John Kruk is, like Gwynn, compact, only more so. He is 5 feet 10 and about 200 pounds. In the clubhouse, where politeness is not mandatory, it is said that he not only has his number but also his picture on the back of his uniform. His number is 8. In a few weeks there will be a new name on the front of his uniform—Phillies—but this day, with no trade or much of anything else on his mind, Kruky, as his teammates call him when not calling him Snack Bar, is waiting his turn with the machine and passing the time singing country music in a soft falsetto: “She looks great in her tight jeans…. Everything I buy has a foreign name.”
Gwynn hits off the machine until a relief pitcher, Mark Grant, arrives to throw to him. Grant is a large, amiable young man with the kind of flat-top haircut that was fashionable in his hometown of Joliet, Illinois, before he was born. In his locker he displays prominently his favorite book, Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. As he pitches, Gwynn reads Grant’s pitching motion. Gwynn identifies and calls out, in the middle of Grant’s deliveries, the kinds of pitches Grant is in the process of throwing. Grant is distressed (well, as distressed as a Dr. Seuss fan can be, which is not very) by this evidence that he is tipping off his pitches, but he is pleased to receive a clinic from Gwynn. While Grant pitches, Gwynn explains what he is seeing: Grant’s arm is less extended than usual when throwing one kind of pitch, his grip on the ball is too visible on another.
Gwynn also enlivens the batting session, with the machine and with Grant, by calling out different game situations as the balls come flying at him. “Man on second, no one out… man on third, one out… infield in, man on first, nobody out… man on third, two outs… first and third, one out… man on first, two outs …” He can tailor his swing to the situation.
A matter of minutes after he began in the batting room he was drenched with sweat. By the time he left the room he had taken more than 200 swings, for the fifth time in as many days. Those 1,000 swings were taken before and after full workdays. When he left the room it was 2:45 P.M., 4 hours and 15 minutes before game time. Still ahead was outfield practice. Oh, yes, and batting practice.
“I remember,” says Gwynn, “when they asked Pete Rose what do you think about Gwynn taking batting practice every day. He said, ‘He’ll learn, the more he plays the more he’ll realize he doesn’t need batting practice every day.’ Pete’s got more hits than anybody but I just don’t feel I’m prepared unless I’m doing what I can to be a little bit smarter, a little bit better, a little bit more prepared. I have been brought up in the game to do every little extra thing, get every bit of extra knowledge that can help you get a base hit in a key situation.” As the twig is bent. He was brought up at home like that. “I think my parents gave it to me. I remember when my mom started to work. She used to be at home, then she got a job in the post office. When she went to the post office she wanted to be prepared. She’d give me the test she had to take and I’d read off the streets and she’d tell me where they connect or whatever. I think it rubbed off.”
According to Professor Carl Ojala of Eastern Michigan University, in the 1950s California replaced Pennsylvania as the richest source of players. Since 1876 the top 10 states are: California, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, New Jersey. Today California, with 12 percent of the nation’s population, produces more than 20 percent of the major league players and Southern California produces most of those. Two are from the same home in Long Beach. Because Tony Gwynn’s father was away from the house from 7:30 A.M. until 5:00 P.M., and his mother worked from 5:30 P.M. until 3:00 A.M., he and his brother Chris, now with the Dodgers, had a lot of time to fill playing. What Tony played most was basketball, which turned out to be a good apprenticeship for baseball. As a point guard in basketball he developed strong wrists from a lot of dribbling. Because of his wrists he has never suffered from what he calls “slow bat syndrome.” And the quickness required of a point guard became the basis of Gwynn’s baserunning skills. He was a good enough basketball player to be drafted by both the Padres and the San Diego (as they then were) Clippers.
You would not know by looking at him that he is such a superb all-around athlete. It is a bit much to say, as has been said, that his is “a body by Betty Crocker.” His 200 pounds are packed on a 5-foot-11 frame. He is thick around the middle and in the thighs—not Kirby Puckett thick, but thick nonetheless. However, a batter hits with his whole body, with hips and legs as well as wrists and arms and shoulders, so no one in San Diego has any reason to complain about how Gwynn is put together.
Emotionally, he is perfect. Gwynn is an almost unfailingly cheerful man who is almost always trying to be morose. Trying but failing. He may be the most liked player in baseball. That is because of the radical difference between his amiableness toward others and his severity toward himself. His ability to combine intense competitiveness and agreeableness makes him the antithesis of the best player in history to combine, as Gwynn does, a high batting average and a lot of stolen bases. Ty Cobb was so detested that in 1910, when Napoleon Lajoie was in a close race with Cobb for the batting title, the St. Louis Browns’ third baseman played extraordinarily deep on the last day of the season so Lajoie could drop seven consecutive bunt singles. They were not quite enough. Lajoie finished at .384, Cobb at .385, but only because the president of the American League, Ban Johnson, was bothered by what the Browns had done. Johnson credited Cobb with a couple of extra hits, enough to put him a point ahead. But before Johnson did that, when it looked as if Lajoie had
won, Lajoie received a congratulatory telegram signed by eight of Cobb’s Tiger teammates. They were not amused by Cobb’s habit—so they said—of not swinging on hit-and-run plays when the pitch was not to his liking, and they resented his decision to sit out the last two games of the season in an attempt to protect his batting lead.
It is inconceivable that Gwynn would ever do either of those things. In September, 1989, at a point when Gwynn was in a nip-and-tuck race for the batting title, he was hurting. His right leg was sore from two foul balls, one off his ankle bone, the other off his toe. The one off his toe made it hard for him to get his shoe on. An even more serious problem was that his left Achilles tendon was so sore he could not push off properly when swinging. This injury was driving down his batting average but he refused to miss a game until his manager insisted. Then he sat out only two games before limping back into the lineup. He won the batting title anyway, catching and passing Will Clark with two 3-for-4 games on the last weekend of the season. Clark said, “I lost to the best.”
There are some wonderful high-average hitters today. Through 1989 Wade Boggs had the fourth-highest career average (.352) in baseball history. In 1989 he became the first player in the modern era (since 1900) to get 200 or more hits in seven straight seasons. Kirby Puckett’s .356 average, in 1988, was the highest for a right-handed batter since DiMaggio’s .357 in 1941 (when he lost the batting title to a left-hander, Ted Williams, by 49 points). By May 7, 1989, Puckett had played in five full major league seasons. By then he had 1,062 hits. Only one player, Joe Medwick, ever got more hits (two more) in his first five years.
According to Roger Craig, Tony Gwynn is “the best pure hitter in this league.” Actually, Gwynn may be the best pure hitter in baseball today, and with his baserunning, he may be the best offensive player. Consider his luminous 1987 season, when he became the first National League player ever to hit as high as .370 while stealing 50 bases (56, actually). Gwynn’s .370 in 1987 was the highest National League average since Stan Musial’s .376 in 1948. Gwynn’s .370 was the second-highest single-season average in the decade, second to George Brett’s .390 in 1980. Gwynn became only the seventh player in history to win two batting titles by 30 or more points. In 1987 it was not until the third week of July that the Padres had a team winning percentage higher than Gwynn’s batting average, .366 to .362. Characteristically, Gwynn used the Padres’ bad record as a way to make light of his achievement. “I think it’s easier to concentrate when you’re getting smoked every night than it is when you’re right in the heat of a pennant race. You can just be relaxed and swing the bat. When I hit .370 it was easy to relax and play the game and have fun.”
It is sometimes said that a batter can expect to have three slumps a season. In 1987 Gwynn did not have any, unless going 0-for-8 counts as a slump. He hit safely in 82 percent of the 155 games he batted in. He never went more than 8 at bats without a hit. He ranked second in the league in stolen bases (56), triples (13) and on-base percentage (.447); he ranked fourth in runs scored (119), tied for eighth in doubles (36) and tenth in walks (82). He struck out only 35 times in 589 at bats, once every 17 times up. Those last two numbers—the large number of walks and small number of strikeouts—go a long way toward explaining all the preceding numbers.
Walking is part of a batter’s duty. Steve Garvey, who was Gwynn’s teammate for five years, collected 2,599 hits and had six 200-hit seasons, but he would have been a more valuable asset to his team if he had walked more. He walked only once per 18.44 at bats. Ted Williams’s average was once per 3.82. “[Stan] Musial,” says Earl Weaver, “was the best at adjusting once the ball left the pitcher’s hand. He’d hit the pitcher’s pitch. Williams was the best at making them throw his pitch. He didn’t believe in adjusting. If it wasn’t the pitch he wanted, he knew enough to walk to first base. That’s why he hit .406.”
Baseball needs more walks and fewer strikeouts. Forty-four times hitters have slugged 20 or more home runs in a season while having fewer strikeouts than home runs. But aside from the Royals’ George Brett in his sensational 1980 season (.390, 24 home runs, 22 strikeouts), no one had done it since 1956, when both Yogi Berra and Ted Kluszewski did it. Clearly many of today’s home-run hitters are conceding less with two strikes on them; they are more determined to hit home runs, regardless of the cost, than sluggers used to be. Only five players—DiMaggio, Gehrig, Kluszewski, Johnny Mize, Mel Ott—have hit 40 or more home runs while striking out 40 or fewer times. Kluszewski did it three times. The last time he did it was in President Eisenhower’s first term—1955. The trend is against that kind of 40–40 season. In 1987 Andre Dawson with 49 home runs and George Bell with 47 became the fifth and sixth players in major league history to have more home runs than walks. That is a sign of indiscipline, but they were rewarded with MVP awards.
Baseball needs subtle standards by which to judge players’ seasons and Tom Boswell has provided one. He has devised the statistic “total average” (TA). Boswell reasons that baseball’s two basic units of measurement are the base achieved and the out made. Each base is a step closer to a run scored, each out is a step closer to an inning ended. Total average is simply the individual’s ratio of bases accumulated for his team to the outs he costs his team. Walks, stolen bases, even being hit by pitches increases your base total average, as Boswell calculates it; but being caught stealing adds an out and grounding into a double play adds two outs. Total average is well suited to the era of artificial turf because it gives special weight to speed, both in terms of bases stolen and double plays avoided. (Being caught stealing not only creates a total average out, it erases a base runner, so getting caught hurts total average by simultaneously adding an out and subtracting a base.) Boswell believes that any player with a TA over .900 is producing at a Hall of Fame level. An .800 TA is All-Star level. Year in and year out the major league average is about .666. Only 17 players in history have compiled career TAs over 1.000. In 1987 Gwynn’s TA was 1.086.
In his career through 1989, Gwynn had a better than .300 average against every National League team. By winning the 1989 batting title he became the first National League player since Musial in 1950–52 to win three consecutive titles. (That is good company. Carl Erskine, the Dodgers’ pitcher, said, “I’ve had pretty good success with Stan—by throwing him my best pitch and backing up third.”) And what has all this earned Gwynn? He is called “the West Coast Wade Boggs.” That is because Gwynn practices his craft at the wrong edge of the continent.
In America news still travels east to west. It is hard for Gwynn to get proper attention for his craftsmanship when he plays in a city with a desert to the east, Japan to the west, Mexico to the south and two other major league teams in the urban sprawl to the north.
After Lee Smith, the big relief pitcher who had many successful seasons with the Cubs, won his first game for the Red Sox, he gave credit to a little boy in the bleachers. Smith said that as he was leaving the bull pen a boy about seven years old leaned over the rail and shouted, “Lee, stay within yourself.” Smith said that was the secret of his success that day. Does that seem implausible? Not to me it doesn’t. Any properly raised American child would have said the same thing. “Stay within yourself” is baseball’s first commandment. It means: Do not try to do things that strain your capacities and distort the smooth working of your parts—what players call “mechanics.” Polonius could have been a baseball coach. Of all his bromides, “To thine own self be true” is the most memorable. It means what baseball players mean when they mutter to themselves “stay within yourself.” Players, at least at the major league level, are severe realists about themselves. They have been playing this difficult game for so long—even the 22-year-olds have—that they know there are players better than they are. Or, to be precise, they know there are many players who can do many things better than they can. Baseball has many roles, plays, skills and situations. Major league players know that they have mastered enough of them, often barely enough of them, to be in the majo
r leagues for a while. They know what they can do and what they can not. To “stay within yourself” is to keep your balance. A player’s reach should not exceed his grasp.
But at one point in his career Gwynn was tempted to overreach. When after his sensational 1987 season he finished only eighth in the National League MVP voting, he succumbed, if only briefly, to bitter thoughts. He began to think that in order to get the respect that any artist worth his salt craves, he would have to truckle to contemporary prejudices and vulgar tastes—he would have to start hitting home runs. (It was either that or tow San Diego around the Cape of Good Hope and tether it to Manhattan, where the media might notice him.) In fact, he could become much more of a power hitter by changing his stroke. He has the strength to hit for distance, and other players have made mid-career changes in the way they swing.
When Kirk Gibson went from the Tigers to the Dodgers in 1988, he shortened his swing slightly, making it more compact and quicker. He knew he was going to see more fastballs in his new league. This is in part because it is a league with parks that reward a running game, and the quicker the pitcher gets the ball to the catcher, the quicker the catcher can get it on its way to second base. But the large number of fastballs in the National League also has something to do with the fact that by 1988 that league’s umpires had produced a strike zone even smaller than the one in the American League. Pitchers presented with this shrunken target were increasingly reluctant to try to throw curveballs into it.
Carlton Fisk was the Red Sox catcher for nine seasons. He had a compact, chopping swing perfect for Fenway Park, perfect for chipping fly balls off or over The Wall. Then in 1981 he went to the White Sox, to a spacious park. (The Sox career records for home runs was Harold Baines’ 186 until Fisk broke it in 1990.) After a few games at Comiskey Park Fisk saw that his stroke was a harmless fly ball stroke in his new home. He soon put himself in the hands of Charlie Lau, the White Sox batting coach. Lau’s fame rested primarily on his ability to coach players who are willing to sacrifice some power for higher batting averages, but in this case Lau’s aim was to help Fisk power the ball out of his new park. Together they reconstructed his swing. Tony La Russa, then manager of the White Sox, remembers returning to the Sox Spring Training camp at Sarasota from a game in Fort Myers when Lau and Fisk had stayed in Sarasota. The Sox bus pulled in at about 6:30 P.M. and, recalls La Russa, “that day it was almost Eliza Doolittle. It worked. That was it.” Fisk would become a slugger and would go on to break the career record for home runs by a catcher.
Men at Work Page 24
