Anyone else have a friend you share fun sports statistics with? I hope so because I do and it is awesome.
If you consume as much sports and sports information as I do, you are bound to come across impressive — and sometimes weird — but interesting statistics. Wondering what I mean? Don’t worry, I have some examples coming.
In my opinion, there is no athlete in the history of sports that provides more of those statistical gems than Tony Gwynn. If you are reading newspapers, you are likely of an age to remember the San Diego Padres legend.
If you aren’t or don’t, I’ll provide inspiration to look him up. The following are just a few of those examples and gems I referenced earlier.
Tony Gwynn could have gone 0 for his next 1,183 at bats, striking out every single time, and he still would’ve finished his career with a .300 batting average.
That would have been very unlikely however because Tony Gwynn only struck out 434 times in his career. That means he averaged about 21 per season. Bear in mind he had approximately 500 plate appearances a season.
He had 19 straight seasons with more walks than strikeouts. In fact, he has more games with four or more hits than he has games with two strikeouts. That is because over the last 35 years, Major League Baseball players have a historical batting average of less than .190 with two strikes whilst Gwynn batted a career .302 when in the same scenario.
This earned him the batting titles in more seasons than not. He qualified for the batting title 15 times and won eight of them.
Wondering how we did against the best of his generation? He faced off against Greg Maddux 107 times. He batted .415 and didn’t strike out once.
I doubt Greg Maddux feels too bad about how he fared against Tony Gwynn but if he does, he shouldn’t. Gwynn batted over .300 against John Smoltz, Nolan Ryan, Tom Glavine and Oral Hershiser too.
Maddux once said, “Sometimes hitters can pick up differences in spin. They can identify pitches if there are different release points or if a curveball starts with an upward hump as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. But if a pitcher can change speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.”
“Except for that (bad word removed so you can go to heaven) Tony Gwynn.”
Okay… so maybe Maddux does still feel bad.
My favorite of all of these astonishing Tony Gwynn stats is that he had less strikeouts throughout his two decades of professional baseball than he had assists during his four years of playing basketball at San Diego State. That is 590 assists and 434 strikeouts, in case you were wondering. It wasn’t even close.
We lost Gwynn to cancer ten years ago. Take a few minutes to read some of the columns written by those who knew him after his passing — including our very own Jim Green — and you understand that he may have been as decent a human as he was great a baseball player.
Local News
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