Tony Gwynn: One of the Greats

Tony Gwynn: One of the Greats

            On June 16^th, 2014 baseball lost one of its best players.  Tony Gwynn died at the age of 54 due to throat cancer brought on by years of tobacco chewing.  Today I wanted to do a quick look at Tony’s career and really show everyone how amazing a hitter this man really was.  So lets get started by looking at his career stats and comparing them to the total averages from the years 2008-2013.

	BB%	K%	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS	BABIP	ISO	wOBA	wRC+
Career	7.7%	4.2%	.338	.388	.459	.847	.341	.120	.370	132
08-13	8.3%	19%	.257	.323	.404	.727	.297	.148	.319	96

            Wow that is amazing to compare isn’t it.  While he never walked much Gwynn was never known for his ability to walk since he had such a smooth swing and such sharp eyes he knew what he could hit.  This fact is proven with that 4.2% K% for his career; think about that for a second.  This day and age we praise players that have a K% of 10% or even 13%, Gwynn had a 4.2% for his career and that to me is just mind-boggling.  I’ve read some reports that said how he had only struck out 3 times in a game 4 times in his career and never struck out 4.  He didn’t take a lot of walks but look at that slash line.  He was still able to maintain an OBP of .388 throughout his career and hit for a staggering .338.  To put that into perspective if *Adam Dunn wanted to hit .300 for his career he’d need to bat 589-589 and to get to Gwynn’s level he’d need to bat 1,066-1,066.

            The one thing you could fault Gwynn for is the lack of HR power only accumulating 135 for his career.  Once again lets look at a comparison; *Cal Ripken Jr. had 431 HR’s and a carer SLG of .447 a very impressive total.  Tony Gwynn had 135 HR’s and a SLG of .459 even higher than Ripken’s career SLG and far less HR’s.  Gwynn was a pure hitter in all the ways possible.  The wRC+ just proves it when he was 32% better than the league at scoring runs.

            This was a short one but it wasn’t going to be a look at his entire career since many of the saber stats that I use aren’t really calculable at this point.  That said I don’t think it matters and the points of how good Gwynn was has been made.  Tony Gwynn stands as one of baseballs best hitters and the sport will miss him dearly.

RIP: Tony “Mr. Padre” Gwynn.

*Trivia taken from @Aceballstats on twitter.