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R.I.P. Tony Gwynn


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Wow, that just sucks. One of my all time favorite players and the best hitter I've ever seen.

 

One time at Shea he's leading off the first as I'm walking in and hits a triple before I even reached my seat.

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He is my all time favorite player. He took the hardest task in sports and made it look so easy. He was always looking for ways to improve, even after establishing himself as an all time great. He was so consistent and confident, and never seemed arrogant.

 

I feel privileged just to have been able to watch his whole career.

 

His lifetime average facing Greg Maddux was .415 and Maddux never struck him out.

The Post’s Tom Boswell called Gwynn “one of the sweetest, nicest, smartest players I ever met in baseball,” in his weekly chat today. “He was always grinning, joking and learning. No better student of hitting since Ted Williams. (Some others also [were] great at it, but none better than Gwynn.)”

Boswell recalled pitcher Greg Maddux telling him how difficult it was to assess the speed of a pitch and likened it to the difficulty of telling how fast a car was going. “If the car was alone on the road,” Boswell wrote on his chat, “‘the human eye can’t do it.’ And, Maddux said, ‘No hitter can tell the difference in speed of different pitches, except that &^%$#@! * Tony Gwynn.”

 

 

Strasburg flashed potential in high school, but poor physical condition and an uneven temper kept colleges away. Two schools offered him a scholarship. He turned down Yale to play for his idol at his hometown school.

Without Gwynn, there would be no Stephen Strasburg as the baseball world knows him. “A father figure,” Strasburg has called Gwynn. In two seasons at SDSU, Strasburg morphed from an overlooked, undrafted high school player to the most anticipated pitching prospect ever. Strasburg credited Gwynn for molding him into a professional competitor and for protecting his arm. Many college coaches ride their ace pitchers to the detriment of their arms. Gwynn never pushed Strasburg for too many pitches, never endangered his career.

 

Link is to a cool audio.

 

http://blogs.marketw...oogle_news_blog

Edited by OGTEleven
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