For Love of the Game? That’s His Story

SAN DIEGO —  Asked about memories, the man with 3,124 hits talked about hot dogs. And mustard. And ketchup. And a kid.

It was about nine years ago, Tony Gwynn was saying Thursday, baseball’s greatest laugh pouring from its greatest smile.

It was a game in San Diego. He had just broken a bat. He noticed a toddler in the stands eating a hot dog.

“The kid had mustard all over one side of his face, and ketchup over another side of his face, not a care in the world, having a great time at the ballpark,” Gwynn recalled.

So moved, Gwynn ran down the right-field line with the broken bat, leaned into the seats, and handed it to the child.

“The look on his face, it’s something I’ll never forget,” Gwynn said. “He was so happy. . . . That look is what the game is all about.”

It was a look shared by all of us who have been lucky enough to know Gwynn during his two decades as a San Diego Padre.

It was a look that left his face Thursday as quickly as one of his sharp grounders leaves the infield.

“This will be my last year,” he said, his eyes momentarily reddening as he faced a crowd of media and friends.

He paused.

“Whew. Lemme take a deep breath.”

Good idea.

When Gwynn retires at the end of this season, it will be more than baseball losing one of its greatest hitters.

The sports world will lose its most affable and unassuming professional athlete.

The Padres will lose one of baseball’s last and finest examples of loyalty.

San Diego will lose access to its most beloved public figure.

And the media will lose the one millionaire athlete still common enough to show up at his retirement news conference in jeans, a golf shirt and an apparel-company cap he dug out of the trunk of his car.

“I’m wearing it because it was the only cap I had in my car,” he said. “I know how fast I sweat when I get nervous, so I knew I had to wear something.”

When the Qualcomm Stadium news conference ended, Gwynn, still working his way off the disabled list, hustled down to the field for early batting practice.

He promptly took his place in line outside the batting cage.

Behind the young son of one of the Padre coaches.

“I don’t look like the normal athlete, I don’t sound like the normal athlete, I don’t do the things the normal athlete does,” said Gwynn, 41. “But somehow I was able to make it all work.”

Because they will probably climb the Cooperstown steps together in 2007, Gwynn forever will be linked with Baltimore’s Cal Ripken, who announced his retirement earlier this summer.

To some, Gwynn will be diminished by the comparison, with critics saying that Ripken was a better all-around player because of the consecutive-games streak and the World Series ring and the fact that he did it all while playing shortstop.

But remember when Ripken circled the field at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, slapping hands with the fans after breaking Lou Gehrig’s record?

In one manner or another, Gwynn did that every day.

“It’s part of my responsibility,” Gwynn said. “People in this community grew up watching me play baseball. Now, some of them have families of their own and they bring their kids to watch me play baseball.

“You want those people to remember every opportunity they had to deal with you.”

Besides, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with putting a smile on someone’s face, being nice to people.”

Not that everyone has always returned the embrace.

Teammates have sometimes said Gwynn was selfish, refusing to move runners with grounders, swinging at pitches instead of allowing them to steal.

Sometimes, some of those charges were true. But in the end, 20 years of hustle and honesty trump all.

I first met Gwynn in 1987, on joining The Times as the Padre beat writer for the now-defunct San Diego County edition.

I walked into the Padre clubhouse on a June day and nearly fainted. Larry Bowa was yelling in the manager’s office. Goose Gossage was storming into the showers. Garry Templeton was glaring from his locker.

Noticing my pallor, Gwynn walked up and shook my hand.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

And so I was, using Gwynn as a touchstone whenever things got crazy, hanging out with him in the clubhouse six hours before games, dissecting victories long after the other players had left.

He liked to talk, and he loved to laugh, and nobody was left out, not the fan in the right-field seats, not the kids waiting around the team bus.

And not my adopted little brother, the one afflicted with cystic fibrosis who was chronicled in these pages two years ago.

Gwynn once thought nothing of hanging out and talking ball with this scrawny 11-year-old one night in Cincinnati, waiting with him in the hotel lobby for the delivery of a pizza.

The pizza, of course, was for Gwynn, always the biggest kid in any group.

I eventually left the beat for the Dodgers, while Gwynn stayed with the Padres.

I eventually became a columnist, while Gwynn stayed with the Padres.

Everyone moved, Gwynn never did, but he never forgot.

While walking behind the Yankee Stadium backstop before the opening game of the 1998 World Series, I heard that familiar laugh.

It was Gwynn, making his first World Series appearance at the same time I was covering my first World Series as a columnist.

We shook hands. He grabbed my shoulder.

“Pretty cool, huh?” he said.

It will be even better at Qualcomm Stadium on Sept. 23 when Gwynn makes his final home appearance as a Padre.

The place will be filled, and the cheers will be deafening for a guy who cost himself millions just for the chance to stand there and hear them.

Just so he can say, as he did Thursday, “The back of my baseball card from here to eternity will look pretty good, I think.”

As he rides into retirement, it is a baseball card that Tony Gwynn no doubt would affix with a clothespin and strap to the spokes.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected].