From a recent issue of the Sporting News comes this quote from the Padres' Tony Gwynn, who is closing in on 3,000 hits in his career:
"I'll be thinking about 4,000 (hits)," he says. "Can I get to 4? Can I play long enough to get to 4? People act like when I get to 3,000, that's it. My career is over now. I'm not going to do anything else, and I can just drift into the sunset. But it ain't going to happen that way. I'm just going to keep on going. And as long as I'm productive and healthy, there's no telling how far I can go. That's how I look at it."
You can read the whole interview in the May 8 issue, or by clicking here. Check Michael Knisley's archived columns if the Gwynn interview doesn't show up directly on the screen.
Only 21 of the more than 10,000 players in major league history have gotten 3,000 or more hits in their careers. Only two (Pete Rose and Ty Cobb) got 4,000 hits. The question here is: can Tony Gwynn get to 4,257 hits and break Pete Rose's record?
Well, let's see here. Gwynn was born in May of 1960, which means that he turned 39 a few weeks ago. He began the year with 2,928 hits in 8,648 at bats for a .339 lifetime average.
Even if Gwynn maintains his .339 lifetime average (which is highly unlikely as a player passes his 40th birthday), he'll need nearly 4,000 more trips to the plate to break Pete Rose's hit record.
How do I know this? Because Gwynn needs 1,329 more hits. 1,329 total hits / .3385 average = 3,926 total at bats.
(A batting average of .3385 rounds up to .339.)
He'll need 3,926 more times at bat than he had at the beginning of 1999, and since Gwynn has averaged 3.89 at bats per game in his career, this translates to 1,010 more games. Even if he never misses a game, he'll have to play seven more seasons (1,010 games / 162 games per season = 6.23 more seasons).
Can you see Tony Gwynn playing seven more years, until he's 46 years old? I can't.
Pete Rose got his 3,000th hit in 1978 when he was 37 years old, two years younger than Gwynn is now. Pete had a lower average than Gwynn, but batted many more times because he hit leadoff for the Reds and because he was almost never out of the lineup with injuries. Rose batted more than 600 times in a season 17 times in his career, while Tony Gwynn has done so only four times, and not at all since 1989. In fact, Gywnn has played in more than 135 games in a season only once since 1989. That's why when Rose was 39, he had about 450 more hits than Gwynn does now.
And just look at the numbers below to see how far Gwynn is behind Ty Cobb, the only other player with 4,000 hits. Cobb entered the majors at age 18 (Rose and Gwynn got there at age 22), and that gave Cobb a big head start. Cobb got his 3,000th hit at age 34, while Gwynn is 39 and just approaching that mark. Tony Gwynn is almost 900 hits behind Cobb's record at the same age.
If you want to see the numbers, here they are:
Games AtBats Hits Average
Rose - age 39 (1963-1979) 2,668 10,824 3,372 .312
Gwynn - age 39 (1982-1998) 2,222 8,648 2,928 .339
Cobb - age 39 (1905-1925) 2,727 10,358 3,821 .369
Tony Gwynn will get his 3,000th hit in a couple of weeks. He's lost too much time in his career with injuries to make a challenge to Pete Rose's record of 4,256 hits, but he's still had a great career. Without Tony Gwynn the Padres would never have made it into two World Series (1984 and 1998). Still, Gwynn seems to have gained some weight; he's looking a little pudgier every year. If anyone breaks Rose's record for hits, it won't be Tony Gwynn.