MLB

Baseball great Tony Gwynn dead at 54

Tony Gwynn succumbed to cancer Monday at the age of 54, sending baseball into mourning for one of its all-time greats.

Gwynn, who played his entire 20-year career with the San Diego Padres, was one of the great pure hitters in baseball history, compiling a .338 career batting average, while leading the Padres to two National League pennants (1984, 1998).

AP
Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2007 with the seventh-highest voting percentage (97.6), Gwynn was a 15-time All-Star who won eight batting titles and five Gold Gloves.

Never hitting below .309 in a full season, Gwynn was robbed of a chance to hit .400, finishing with a .394 average during the strike-shortened 1994 season. His 3,141 hits rank 18th all-time.

“For more than 30 years, Tony Gwynn was a source of universal goodwill in the national pastime, and he will be deeply missed by the many people he touched,” Commissioner Bud Selig said.

Agent John Boggs said Gwynn died at a hospital in suburban Poway, Calif.

Gwynn, who had been the baseball coach at his alma mater, San Diego State, since 2002, had been on medical leave while undergoing treatment for cancer of a salivary gland.

Gwynn had two operations for cancer in his right cheek between August 2010 and February 2012. The second surgery was complicated, with surgeons removing a facial nerve because it was intertwined with a tumor inside his right cheek. They grafted a nerve from Gwynn’s neck to help him eventually regain facial movement.

Gwynn had said that he believed the cancer was from chewing tobacco.

Survivors include his wife, Alicia, daughter Anisha and son Tony Jr., who plays with the Philadelphia Phillies.

“I always try to get in an ‘I love you,’ ” Gwynn Jr. said in a recent interview about his father with CSNPhilly. “For a while that was uncomfortable for me, I don’t know why. But since 2010, it hasn’t been uncomfortable. It’s something I want to make sure I get in because you never know what’s going to happen.”

With AP