“After about a month and a half I said maybe I’m looking for the ball inside too much. They were trying to bust me inside but were getting me out away. I was looking for the ball in. If you are looking for the ball away, you can still react on the ball in. But if you are looking for the ball in and they throw you away, you can’t react to it.” Your bat can cover the outside and then come in, but it can not start inside and get back out for a pitch away. By the end of the first six weeks he had struck out, he estimates, 25 times and a dozen of those were on called strikes on the outside corner. “I would just freeze on them. Then one day in early July I came out early and had our left-handed batting practice pitcher throw to me. I had just finished watching tapes from 1984 and I got an idea: Look for the ball away and hit it away. I wanted to work on it against a left-handed pitcher because if you look for the ball away on a right-handed pitcher and it comes in on you, it’s easier to react on. But off a left-handed pitcher, if you’re looking for the ball away and it comes in, it’s more difficult to read. I had him throw for about 25 minutes. After about 10 minutes I started picking the ball up and reacting to it.”
That night he was 2-for-4 with two singles to left and two ground balls up the middle, balls that, if the defense had not been playing him up the middle, would have gone through for base hits. The middle infielders might not have been playing him up the middle if the scouts’ network had not spread the word that he had been trying to pull the ball more than usual. Next, the Pirates came to San Diego and played him like a left-handed pull hitter because they were going to pitch him inside. They, too, had heard the word. They were to see that the word was out of date. “I had six hits against them and five were to left field.” Next came the Cubs, also playing him to pull to right. He got seven hits in that series, five of them straight up the middle. “Then came the All-Star break. I did not go down to the cage and hit. I knew I’d found it.” In his first at bat after the break he stroked a clean, sharp single to left.
The slump that ended was a normal baseball phenomenon, the result of a delicate maladjustment in a sport very unforgiving of those. The way Gwynn went about ending it was an unusual combination of sweat and high tech. It involved a form of minute and reiterated scrutiny of baseball’s component actions that was not possible until recently.
The biggest difference between Triple-A ball and the big leagues, according to Gwynn, is that big-league pitchers are so consistently “around the plate.” Of course they throw harder and their breaking balls have better movement, but the most important difference is that “in Triple-A you didn’t know whether they were going to throw a fastball on the black [the edge of the plate] or a fastball behind your back. It was easier to hit up here than in Triple-A because the guys are around the plate and you’re playing the same guys over and over. So when I came up I made it a point to watch—watch guys throw in the bull pen, on TV, everywhere.” Gwynn, perhaps more than any other player, has made a full-time job of baseball’s watchfulness.
He has a large, sprawling Southern California-style house. Outside is a satellite dish proportional to the house. What would you like to see? he asks. I answer, the Home Team Sports telecast out of Baltimore of the Orioles-Indians game in Cleveland. Click. Whir. And there is Cal Ripken scooping up a grounder at shortstop on the shore of Lake Erie. Rogers Hornsby (his .424 in 1924 is the highest average of the century) not only refused to go to movies, he would not look out train windows, lest the looking strain his eyes. Gwynn will look at tapes for hours. He has one tape of each team. Each tape has all his at bats against that team in the season. He has a tape that should be called “Tony Gwynn, the Movie,” featuring all his at bats in the previous season.
Gwynn is, of course, not the only player making use of such technology. Some players even use it during a game. When Lee Smith, the relief pitcher, was with the Cubs he would watch games from the dugout for a few innings and then go to a videotape room. Drawing upon a file of film, he would study the hitters he might face later that day, checking such things as their tendency to swing at first pitches. But that is information that can be contained in a statistical chart. Video machines are more important for batters who are trying to imprint on their mental retinas a pitcher’s motions and the movements of his pitches.
Gwynn records on small vidéocassettes about the size of audiocassettes. They can be played back in an automatic frame-by-frame staccato sequence. To know if he is swinging correctly, he counts the frames from when the pitcher lets go of the ball until his, Gwynn’s, front shoulder “opens up”—turns to the right. Gwynn watches as the Cubs’ Rick Sutcliffe releases the ball toward the Gwynn on the screen, and as the tape ticks along from frame to frame, Gwynn counts, “There’s one… two… three… four… five… six… seven… eight… nine… ten…. There,” he says with satisfaction at the high count, “ten frames. That means I’m staying on the ball. I’m keeping my front shoulder in and staying back. If I open it up before then, I’m through, I’m out in front.” On the swing he has just watched on tape, he drove the ball for a hit. On the next swing, in the next at bat on the tape, he counts “… seven… eight… nine—I’m gone.” At frame nine he was too far forward. “See,” he says, “instead of going into the ball, I went like”—here he jumps to his feet to demonstrate how his front shoulder turned too soon toward the right side of the infield. That made it impossible for him to attack the pitch, which was a slider running away from him on the outside of the plate. “That’s what I was doing for the first two and a half months, all the time.” Could he see the problem on film at that time? Yes, but “I didn’t need to see it. I knew. Because when you start your swing and your front shoulder goes [opens up—turns out], your plate coverage goes.” When he was “opening up” too soon, he was losing coverage of the outside of the plate, which is where he finds his bread and butter—the pitches he can drive to left. “When you open your front shoulder you are telling the pitcher that the only pitch you are going to be able to hit is the inside pitch.” The inside pitch, which he does not prefer, became the only pitch he could hit, the only pitch in the zone covered by his swing. Pitchers were then pitching him on the inside edge of the plate until he was behind in the count and had to bat defensively, swinging at anything in or on the edge of the strike zone. Then they were getting him out “away.” That is, they were getting him out with pitches on the outside part of the plate where his bat, because of his prematurely turned shoulder, could not reach with authority. His small mechanical flaw had restricted him to the kind of pitches he preferred to let pass. Also, by pulling off the ball, his weight had shifted so his swing had no power to drive the ball. He was hitting too much with his arms. For power he wants to be “closed”—his shoulder not yet turned—at the instant the bat meets the ball.
As the tape ticks along through various Gwynn at bats, he occasionally—very occasionally—murmurs to himself, “That’s a good swing.” Asked how many of his swings are good ones, his laughter wells up and he says, “Not many.” He means it. “If you get fooled you’re not going to have a good swing. If you swing at a bad pitch you’re not going to have a good swing.” Such miscalculations happen because—and here we are back to the basic fact of baseball life—the pitcher knows what he is trying to do, and the batter is guessing. Gwynn says that happens to him often. Remember, Mike LaValliere says it happens to Gwynn ten times a season.
Fast-forwarding the tape, he comes to an at bat when there was a runner on first, no outs and a 3–1 count, one of McKeon’s favorite hit-and-run counts. The Gwynn on tape looked toward the third-base coach and was pleased to see the hit-and-run sign. “It gives me another hole to shoot at,” explains Gwynn watching Gwynn. Yes, but a hit-and-run sign may require him to swing at a pitch he would otherwise let pass. Is it worth the trade-off? “It’s a great trade-off,” he says, “because I want to go the other way. If the second baseman is covering [covering second as the runner breaks from first with the pitch], then that’s another matter, because I really do
n’t want to pull the ball unless I have to.” But what if the runner starts and the pitch is four inches out of the strike zone? “On which half,” he asks, “inner half or outer half? If it’s four inches off the outer half, it’s still going to work to my advantage—I can still reach out and poke it. On the inside half, it’s another matter, it’s tough to handle. You can’t hit that ball in the hole.” During the at bat Gwynn is watching on tape, before he gets a chance to act on the hit-and-run sign, the pitcher balks, the runner on first advances to second. Now Gwynn might be required to do what he does not like to do: pull the ball to the right side (to allow the runner to advance to third). But because Gwynn is hot again, McKeon “is going to let me hack.” On the next pitch he is fooled by a split-finger fastball. His weight shifts too soon and his front leg is slightly bent. He beats the ball into the ground, toward a spot to the left of the second baseman. However, he was being pitched inside (remember, the word was out, spread by the scouts), and the opposing team assumed he would pull, so the second baseman was shaded to the right. The badly hit ball made it through the infield for a hit and an RBI.
Wearing a loose-fitting white sport shirt, faded denim slacks and Nike running shoes (he has a contract with Nike; all God’s children got shoes but Gwynn’s children are particularly well provided for), Gwynn sits on the floor of his den in front of a television set from which pours the unmistakable voice of Harry Caray, who broadcasts Cubs games for WGN, a cable superstation. Gwynn is watching a tape of himself at bat in San Diego, but taped from WGN cable out of Chicago. The Gwynn on screen backs out of the box after each pitch and talks to himself, swings his right arm on a flat plane through an imaginary strike zone. (He should watch what he says when talking to himself. Mel Stottlemyre, once a Yankee pitcher, now the Mets’ pitching coach, says he used to read Carl Yastrzemski’s lips when Yaz was talking to himself between pitches. “If I saw his lips saying ‘Be quick, be quick,’ I’d throw him a change-up. If he was saying ‘stay back, weight back,’ I’d throw him a fastball.”)
Gwynn’s slump is ending. As the tape rolls through his VCR, the scene on the screen changes to Wrigley Field. There is a crack of a bat on a ball. “There’s another hit for Gwynn,” exclaims the husky voice of Harry Caray. “Holy cow. That’s his seventh hit of the series.” The tape resumes with Gwynn’s next at bat. “There’s another hit for Gwynn. Holy cow.” The tape rolls. Another park, another broadcaster. Another Gwynn hit—an RBI double. “Wow,” says the broadcaster. “All I can say is wow.” The 1987 batting champion is back in the hunt for the 1988 title.
Major league clubhouses vary in their ambiance. Some are relatively (these things are very relative) sedate, others give a visitor the sense of having been swallowed by MTV. San Diego’s clubhouse in late July, 1988, was on the lively side, and well it should have been. By then the lark was on the wing, the snail was on the thorn, God was in Heaven and all was right with the world because Tony Gwynn was hitting again. His mood was as bouncy as the beat of the music being pumped through the clubhouse. To be precise his mood was as upbeat as it could be within the circle of self-reproach he had drawn around his performance. He had climbed back to .300, but when asked about the possibility of another batting title, he said: “If I win it, it will be nice, but it isn’t going to be worth a hill of beans to me. I pride myself on consistency. You might be consistent for three months and win the title but that is not going to make up for those first three months, for me.”
He could pinpoint the hinge of the season. “One at bat turned it around for me. It was against Pittsburgh. Bob Walk was pitching. He threw a running fastball away, I stayed on it, drove it to left field, and from that point on I hit the ball well. After that I hit in nine straight games. Eight of them were multiple-hit games. I went from .237 to .277 in eight games, and I knew my thinking had changed because I was going up to the plate and trying to hit the ball the other way. I had been going to the plate knowing they were going to pitch me inside and I’d try to pull it. Before, I’d know they were going to pitch me inside but I’d just wait a bit and inside-out it.” In an 18-game streak he had 15 multihit games, batted .513 (39-for-76) and raised his average more than 60 points to .309. During this period the Padres, too, were recovering—from their horrendous start of the season (16–31)—but they were not really pennant contenders. Was it hard for Gwynn to maintain the intensity necessary to pull himself back into contention for the batting title (that he eventually won at .313)? Gwynn’s instant answer indicated distaste for the question.
“No,” he said with a quiet emphasis. “Last year, when I was going through bankruptcy and the team was in last place, people used to say, ‘How did you do it, hit .370?’ I said, playing was easy. That is how I got my relief, where I came to have fun. This year has been in some ways more difficult because I have never swung the bat this poorly before. I mean, I had to grow up, too. You get to the point where you feel like you’re better than you really are. You go out and have some success, and then you succeed again and again, and then you start to believe that this is what’s ‘supposed’ to happen.”
In society, virtue is supposed to be crowned with success. Hard work should produce accomplishments and accomplishments should bring recognition and respect. It does not always work out that way. A sport is a circumscribed area of controlled striving and, in a limited sense, is a model of a good society, where rules are respected and excellence is rewarded. Part of the pleasure of sport is in savoring this sense of a small, well-ordered universe. Of course, sport includes some young men and some not-so-young men who have never grown up, who are self-absorbed, willful, vain and arrogant, as headlong in satisfying their appetites as in their athletic competition. But precisely because competition at the pinnacle of American sport offers many temptations, and because physical abilities can carry an athlete far without a commensurate portion of good character, the achievements of the genuine grown-ups, of whom Gwynn is one, are all the more to be admired.
Once when Vincent Van Gogh’s brother asked him how he painted, Van Gogh answered, “I see things that I have conjured in my imagination and in my memory and mind over a long period of time. Then it all just pours out.” As we have seen, that is how Gwynn hits. For him, baseball is (to put the point playfully) a combination of muscle memory and cultural literacy. Until coaxed into elaboration, Gwynn takes a severely minimalist approach to explaining his craft. “I just try to see the ball well and hit it.” But what he actually does in preparing to play is strikingly at odds with that downbeat description. And it is a refutation—one would hope that by now it is a redundant refutation—of a myth.
There is a myth of the “natural athlete” whose effortless excellence is a kind of spontaneous blooming. That myth is false and pernicious. It dilutes the emulative value of superior performers. It does so by discounting the extent to which character counts in sport. The myth is especially damaging to blacks. Sport has become an especially important arena of excellence—and a realm of upward mobility—for blacks. However, their successes have sometimes been tainted by a residue of racism, the notion that blacks are somehow especially “suited” to physical endeavors. The problem is not only, or even primarily, ideas as half-baked as Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder’s ideas about why blacks have been “bred” for sports. Rather, the primary problem is the idea—itself not necessarily connected with any malevolent theory or motive—that nature has been especially bountiful to particular classes of people. The idea that blacks are “natural” basketball players is akin to the idea, now gathering dust in the museum of antique superstitions, that the Irish are natural fighters. (Actually, the Irish so dominated baseball in the early years of this century that writers of the time speculated on their inbred advantages.) The fundamental fact is this: For an athlete to fulfill his or her potential, particularly in a sport as demanding as baseball, a remarkable degree of mental and moral discipline is required.
A great black player received a lot of semi-disparaging praise as a “natura
l.” Willie Mays had just turned 20 when he made his major league debut. His ebullience—his high-pitched laughter, the postgame stickball games in the streets of Harlem—occasioned frequent references to the “childlike” enthusiasm and “instinctive” play of this “natural.” Often the condescension was unconscious, but it was nonetheless corrosive. The truth is that Mays was, from the first, a superb craftsman.
Bill Rigney, whose career as a Giants infielder was ending as Mays’s career was beginning, unhesitatingly calls Mays the best player he ever saw. Rigney calls Mays the “complete” player and illustrates Mays’s total concentration and mastery of the game with this detail: As a rookie, Mays would reach second base and peer in at the opposing catcher flashing the finger signs to the pitcher for one or two batters. When Mays returned to the dugout he would have decoded the signs, reporting, for example, that the second (or first, or third, or fourth) is the real sign, the others are chaff. Mays received much praise for his baserunning “instincts.” But again, such praise often is veiled—and not very well veiled—condescension. Mays’s “instincts” were actually the result of meticulous work. For example, almost every day of his career he took “second infield”—that is, he took infield practice before the game, after the starting infielders had practiced. While other players were in the clubhouse changing their shirts and relaxing, he was working out at first base. He did it partly to limber up, but primarily to remind himself of where the infielders play on cutoffs of throws from the outfield. Then when he got a hit he could see out of the corner of his eye whether the other team’s infielders were where they should be and whether he could take an extra base.
Mays would have had more doubles if he had had less baseball sense: He would have had more doubles if he had not sometimes stopped at first base rather than advance to second when he could have. By advancing he would have left first base empty and tempted the other team to walk the man batting behind him. (That man often was Willie McCovey, who was pitched to often enough to hit more home runs—521—than any other left-hander in National League history.) Mays was so disciplined and confident that sometimes he would not just take a pitch he wanted to hit, he would swing at and intentionally miss a pitch he could have easily hit. By doing so in an early inning he might cause the pitcher to serve it up again in a later inning when it might be especially needed.
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