Padres legend Tony Gwynn passes away at age 54

Via ABC 10 in San Diego, we have a touching tribute to Tony Gwynn:

If this were on the outside of Petco Park -- literally wrapping around the entire perimeter of the ballpark -- I wouldn’t mind. I’m pretty sure no one else would, either.

Tony Gwynn passed away last week after a fight with salivary cancer. While there’s no way to prove definitively that his cancer was due to a lifetime of chewing tobacco, it seems extraordinarily likely. Stephen Strasburg, who played under Gwynn at San Diego State, is convinced, and he’s doing something about it:

Saying you’re going to quit is a lot easier than quitting -- I say that out of experience, not to be flip -- but if anything’s going to push someone like Strasburg in the right direction, this would be it. Tobacco is pernicious, nasty stuff that’s incredibly hard to shake, so best of luck to Strasburg.

When Tony Gwynn passed away last week, I felt not just sadness but a fervent desire to see him again as he was in his prime, when both he and I were brimming with potential -- mostly him. Then I took a step further back and I realized it’s not just him. He’s not the only part of my baseball youth who have gone on. There are so many more.

If you will forgive the observance of a personal holiday, 2014 represents the 30^th anniversary of my adult interest in baseball. I am old enough that I cheered for the 1977 and 1978 Yankees as a young child, but it was 1984 when I first read Bill James and saw the game for what it was, had my imagination captured by a blossoming young first baseman named Don Mattingly, and really got it in a way that, although I didn’t know it at the time, would lead to a career writing about the game.

There is now a Tony Gwynn-shaped hole in each of our lives. One of the finest hitters in modern history, one of the few that Ted Williams took into his confidence and treated as an equal, passed away Monday morning at the age of 54. He was far, far, far too young and we hadn’t even begun to wring all the great stories and wisdom out of him that were presumably in there. Speaking purely out of selfishness, I’m both sad and angry about his loss.

When someone as beloved as Gwynn leaves us too soon, it’s natural to ask one of life’s great unanswerable questions: “Why?” Gwynn thought he knew why: half a lifetime of chewing tobacco use followed by cancer of his salivary glands. Did all that tobacco use, at one point reportedly two tins a day, specifically cause his cancer? No one can say with absolute certainty, but statistically speaking we know that using dip or snuff can and does cause cancer, and we know that Gwynn used heavily. Gwynn was convinced. “Of course it caused it...I always dipped on my right side.” That side, of course, is where the cancer spread from. Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, but we would be remiss not to notice a connection.

The players we care about the most are not necessarily the ones that bring us the most happiness. There is too much riding on it for the relationships to be quite as healthily abstract as they should be. Baseball players are, in the end, actors in a television show that we watch all summer. This is easier to understand and remember when viewed from a healthy distance, but we don’t necessarily watch our teams from a healthy distance.

That lack of distance and perspective is sort of the definitional thing about caring about a team, actually, and the fact that it leads otherwise well-adjusted men and women to entrust a portion of our psychological well-being to strangers named Dayton Moore or Lucas Duda -- which is a very stupid thing to do -- doesn’t stop us from doing it. There will always be some degree of fan-blind partisanship, and so there are always these jagged, mine-strewn DMZs standing between people with rooting interests and certain players.

The baseball world is still mourning the loss of Padres great Tony Gwynn, one of the most beloved figures in the sport. There aren’t that many ways to make yourself feel better, but this is one of them: a video of Gwynn talking about his video prowess on a 25-year-old episode of This Week in Baseball:

The Mel Allen narration only accentuates the awesomeness. I miss Gwynn already.

Hall of Fame outfielder Tony Gwynn died on Monday. There is justice in the fact that his passing will be mourned with a greater intensity than he was sometimes celebrated during his career. In early 1986, Peter Gammons, then of Sports Illustrated, convened Wade Boggs, Don Mattingly, and Ted Williams for a roundtable on hitting. Williams, of course, was the self-proclaimed greatest hitter who had ever lived and had the .406 batting average to prove it as well as a plaque on the wall at Cooperstown. Boggs, 28 that season, had to that point won two of an eventual five batting titles. Mattingly, 25, had already won his sole batting title in 1985, though he’d come close on a couple of other occasions.

Later, he would become friends with Williams, and, as so many younger players did, relish talking hitting with him. But that recognition from the San Diego native hadn’t yet come. SI let that roundtable breathe, allowing Williams, Boggs, and Mattingly roll on for page after page. At one point, Gammons asks Williams to name some favorite active major-league hitters. Teddy Ballgame’s answer:

Clutch hitting is a myth. Tony Gwynn was a clutch hitter. Long live clutch hitting.

That’s the article, in three short sentences, so consider everything that follows a part of the footnotes. It’s probably best to revisit that first sentence and set some ground rules. I don’t know how many people actually believe that clutch hitting is an indisputable myth these days, actually. If you believe that a human being’s physical abilities and mental capabilities can be different under varying circumstances, then you at least allow for the possibility of clutch hitting.

I don’t remember Tony Gwynn ever striking out, because it almost never happened. For comparison’s sake, let’s consider that Adam Dunn, the great strikeout artist of our time, once struck out 588 times over a three-year stretch. Gwynn played 20 seasons and struck out only 434 times. These days, hitters strike out about 18 percent of the time. Gwynn, over the course of his entire career: four percent.

The only memory I have of him failing is from This Week In Baseball or a show a lot like it. Gwynn was playing a baseball video game with his kid. The game’s developers, without telling him, completely rigged it against him. Every other pitch he threw, he was lit up for a home run. At the plate, every ball he put into play was a dribbler to the mound. He just sort of chuckled, because he’s Tony Gwynn. True scientists don’t get upset when their laws go belly-up.

Tony Gwynn meant a lot to me growing up, as he likely did to just about anyone who got the chance to appreciate his greatness. With his passing, we’ll get the chance to reflect on both the man and the player -- you cannot say enough about either, as they were both tremendous.

I don’t know how you grieve, and I’m not about to tell you how to, but I’m going to spend at least some of my mourning watching old Gwynn highlights where I can find them. MLB’s YouTube page thankfully has some Gwynn, despite most of his career coming in a pre-YouTube era. Come appreciate Tony Gwynn with me by watching what made him so enjoyable during his career.

Hall of Fame Padres outfielder and broadcaster Tony Gwynn passed away on Monday morning, after a lengthy battle with cancer. Both the Padres and Major League Baseball confirmed the tragic news. Gwynn was just 54 years old.

Tony Gwynn was diagnosed with cancer in a salivary gland back in 2010, and underwent multiple surgeries to attempt to remove it. His condition worsened this spring, though, and in March Gwynn took a leave of absence from San Diego State University, where he has served as the team’s coach for over a decade, in order to focus on his health.