One of my all time favorite players. Sad loss for the game today.
Indeed. I was just coming to start a thread about it myself. Not only was he a great hitter, but he seemed to be an all-around nice guy. And he genuinely loved the game.
He will be missed.
Great player, was probably best hitter I ever saw. RIP.
I was just thinking about Tony Gwynn the other day, as they mentioned on the Indians game that Justin Masterson went to SD State while Gwynn was involved in the baseball program there. They mentioned that Masterson played in Tony Gwynn stadium and it made me smile that the park there is named for Gwynn, because the only thing I know about San Diego apart from the chicken is Tony Gwynn. And I don’t just mean the Padres, I mean he is the only thing I know about all of San Diego 
A very good guy in baseball, indeed. Gone way too soon.
Tony Gwynn faced Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux a combined 143 times, he batted. 349 against them, and never struck out. In his entire career, ZERO pitchers have 10 or more strikeouts against Gwynn. Nolan Ryan struck him out 9 times in 67 AB, but Gwynn owned a .302 batting average against him.
I remember when he first came on the scene, analysts explaining part of his success as due to all the film/tape he studied. This may have been normal for football at the time but I believe he was one of the early ones to use it to that extent for baseball. If memory serves he had tons of TVs in his home on a wall, all for the extreme amout of time he devoted to study.
Gone at 54, cancer is a bitch.
Damn
Fuck you, cancer.
MLB.com reported earlier that Gwynn never struck out more than 40 times in a season in his entire career. He struck out exactly 40 times in 1988. And hit .313 that year. His lowest BA in his entire career was .289, and that was his rookie season. He never batted under .309 again.
Too soon, too badly for such a great person.
As a Giants fan, Gwynn was always on “the other team” for me and was one of the most feared opponents of his era. But the thing I always think of when his name comes up is the mismatch between his looks and his voice - gigantic black power hitters just shouldn’t sound like scrawny SoCal surfer dudes.
Batter up.
Yeah! That always stuck out for me too, when I watched playoffs. Always made me smile 
Here’s a clip of Gwynn talking to Ted Williams about hitting. It’s neat. And Tony giggles a lot.
Not to take anything away but he wasn’t a power hitter. .459 slugging-338 on the list. 17 HR was his season best and he averaged only 9 per 162 games.
But his strikeout rate was insanely low, his lifetime BA was unreal for the era and the fact he played his whole career for one team says a lot.
Makes you wonder about the idiot 3% who didn’t vote HOF.
Some people vote against just so there are no unanimous selections. Greg Maddux, Tom Seaver, Cal Ripken Jr, and George Brett also had votes against them. To the best of my knowledge, there’s never been a unanimous selection to the HOF.
Seaver’s vote was the highest overall, with 98.84% voting him in.
Wow.
I looked up it; against Maddux, Gwynn batted .415 with eleven walks and no strikeouts. That’s in over a hundred at bats. That’s a man against a boy is what that is.
The sponsor on Gwynn’s B-R page has a picture of him with a message reading in part “You were a better person than a hitter.” Quite true. Far too soon.
I’d never seen that before, thanks.
I HAD seen a similar conversation years ago between Gwynn and Stan Musial. It seemed as if he and Stan had a shared language and a shared understanding of hitting known to only a blessed few!
I know exactly what you mean, but I never thought of his voice as that of a surfer dude.
Rather… ever see a black comedian making fun of the way white people talk? Tony always sounded like a black guy putting on a squeaky “white” voice as a goof!
He was an amazing hitter and he always seemed like a very nice guy. And here’s a great trivia fact, from the New York Times obit:
Don’t all black comedians begin their routines with a whiteguy-voice or whiteguy-dance joke? 
Actually to be fair I think those jokes kid of faded out in the earlyto mid 2000’s.
I still have TG’s Topps Rated Rookie card in a sleeve. It’s one of the only baseball cards I still have. I remember when I was a kid opening packs of cards and getting a Gwynn card in like every other pack. That and Jose Canseco.
Joe Dimaggio only had 88%. Wow.
Joe actually had to wait a few years! At least TOny got in on the first ballot!