He was our Rogers Hornsby. He was our Honus Wagner. He was our Ted Williams.
|  | | Tony Gwynn has hit over .370 four times. Over the past 60 years, all other players have combined to do it eight times. |
Most of us never saw those men swing a bat. But we saw Tony Gwynn -- the greatest bat artiste of his generation, the greatest bat artiste of our generation.
Check out those names that keep him company on the list of highest batting averages of all time: Nap Lajoie. Willie Keeler. Lou Gehrig. Al Simmons.
How did a modern videotape freak like Tony Gwynn get to hang around in that crowd?
It was one thing to hit .338 for a lifetime back when there were no light towers, no airplanes, no sliders, no setup men and, most importantly, no Baseball Tonight.
But to do it in the age that Gwynn has done it is the equivalent of bicycling to the moon. Can't be done. Shouldn't be possible. But Tony Gwynn did it.
"He sees the ball different than anybody else," said his one-time hitting coach, Merv Rettenmund. "He sees things no one else sees. If the pitcher throws a changeup, he can tell from the dugout the guy's throwing a changeup. He sees the guy's fingers on the ball, and he knows. No one else sees the ball like that. It's not normal, you know. That's just not normal."
Then again, "normal" is about the last word in the dictionary you would use to describe Gwynn's whole career.
Think about the stuff this guy has done:
He's hit .338 over a 20-year career. No one else whose career started in the last half-century is closer than 10 points of him -- at least no one who has been to the plate even half as many times as Gwynn has.
In the 14 seasons from 1984 through 1997, Gwynn finished in the top five in the batting race 13 times. And in the only season he didn't -- in 1990 -- he missed by one hit.
He has had four different seasons in which he hit .370 or higher. In the 60 years since Ted Williams last hit .400, all the other hitters who passed through the big leagues -- a group that includes Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Wade Boggs, yadda, yadda, yadda -- combined to do it only eight times.
No hitter born in the 20th century reached 3,000 hits in fewer games (2,284) or at-bats (8,874) than Gwynn. In the history of baseball, only Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie got there faster -- and when they played, the gloves were made of the same material as those trains they rode on.
No hitter born in the 20th century soared beyond 3,000 hits and had a higher lifetime batting average than Gwynn (.338). In fact, according to the Elias Sports Bureau's Steve Hirdt, no hitter born since 1918 (i.e., since Ted Williams) has even had 2,000 hits and an average this high.
No hitter who has played his entire career since the invention of the designated hitter has accumulated as many hits as Gwynn (3,124) without spending a large portion of his career in the American League. But Gwynn got every one of those hits in the National League. And he's proud of that.
Gwynn had six straight seasons in which he struck out fewer than 20 times. As he stepped to the podium to announce his retirement Thursday, there were 29 players in the big leagues who had whiffed more than 20 times just this month.
Finally, what does it mean to have piled up a .338 batting average over a 20-year career, over 9,234 at-bats? It means Tony Gwynn would have to go 0 for his next 1,180 to get his average to fall under .300 (and even then, to just .29998).
So in clubhouses all across America on Thursday, people were talking about this man. And most of them had a certain awe in their voice as they did.
"Him watching all those videotapes of his swing -- that got me into watching my tapes," said Florida's Cliff Floyd. "I used to watch my tapes and say, 'Hey, my mustache looks different tonight.' But Tony taught me to watch my tapes and ask, 'Why'd I foul that ball off?' I used to try to figure out, 'Why does he watch his tapes? He's hitting .390.' So I asked him. And he said, 'There's always room for improvement.' And if he could feel like that, how could I not?"
Gwynn owns hits off Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro. He owns 39 hits off Greg Maddux. And none of these pitchers have ever struck him out: Pedro Martinez (35 AB), Hideo Nomo (25 AB), Greg Swindell (35 AB), Maddux (90 AB) and Mike Hampton (37 AB).
"When he strikes out swinging," Rettenmund said, "the pitcher's shocked. He's shocked. Everybody in the stadium is shocked. He's the best hitter I've seen in 35 years."
For some reason, Cal Ripken Jr.'s retirement seems to have evoked more of a swell of emotion than Gwynn's. Maybe that's because Gwynn spent 20 years playing in as low-profile a town as there is in baseball. Maybe that's because Gwynn never had that one defining, national, tear-jerking heal-the-nation moment that Ripken had.
But he once pumped all the way around from first base in an All-Star Game to score the winning run in extra innings.
And after nearly becoming the only 3,000-hit man of modern times to never get an at-bat in Yankee Stadium, he crushed a World Series homer off the upper-deck facade in the first game he ever played there.
And while his teams lost eight of the nine World Series games he got to play in, that sure wasn't Gwynn's fault. He went 8-for-16 against the Yankees in that '98 Series. And his career World Series average (.371) was even higher than his career regular-season average (.338).
And all the while, he comported himself with dignity and class and a smile as consistent as his swing. That didn't stop some of his peers from accusing him of being selfish or overrated. But the young guys knew he was the one superstar out there who always had time to drop an encouraging word on them.
"I remember talking to him one day," Floyd said. "And he said, 'Your hands are so quick.' That changed my whole outlook on the game, because I didn't know my hands were quick. I thought two things. One was: 'Damn, I'm stupid.' And the second was: 'It must be true coming from a great hitter like him.'"
We occasionally heard baseball people accuse him of caring only about his numbers. But Gwynn himself always told us he would never hang around just to pad those numbers.
"It's not about that," he said. "It's just about doing what you love to do and doing it till you've had enough."
And now he has indeed had enough. But we'll miss him.
For most of the two decades Tony Gwynn was in the game, we never had to dread that annual spring assignment of picking the batting champ. He made our job easy -- in that way, in every way.
We never saw Hornsby. We never saw Cobb. We never saw Tris Speaker. But we saw Tony Gwynn. And we'll always be proud to tell our grandchildren we did.
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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