Tony

The Tony Gwynn Topps rookie card. An iconic image to Padres fans and any baseball card collector with even an ounce of pride. Looking at it, even on a computer screen, fills my heart with all things good and true and happy.

I remember when I first saw the card. My Mom and Dad drove us out to Timberlake for an afternoon barbecue and swimming. Actually, I don't know if we barbecued. My family in the early '80s was more the "pick up a few sandwiches and sodas and grab a corner of a picnic table" type. Anyway, on the way we stopped at a gas station and my Dad, as per his usual practice, bought me a few packs of cards. Probably didn't cost much. If I looked on the internet I could probably find a link to some site that could tell me the price of a Topps wax pack in Central Illinois in the summer of 1983, but I'm not going to look for that at the moment. I'm a busy man.

The summer of 1983 was the first year I really collected cards and really remember stuff about baseball. I know this because my card collection exploded that year. Sure, I have a few '82 Topps cards (more than a few, actually) but they always seemed from a remote time, as if out of some distant - yet also recent - past. My theory on this is that Dad probably just bought packs because he liked cards and wanted to get me interested. I may have said I was interested but I have no recollection of that. My first memories of asking my Dad to buy me packs and then opening them was in 1983. (Added to this, the first World Series I remember watching was the previous Fall, the Fall of '82, when Bruce Sutter struck out a Brewer to win Game 7. I have no recollection whatsoever of the '81 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers.)

But I have digressed, and I aplogize. So I'm sitting in the car on a summer day opening a Topps wax pack and we arrived at the Timberlake parking lot and the AC went off and - I remember this like it was yesterday - I was sitting there as the car heated up flipping through the last cards in the pack when I came across a Padre I didn't recognize. A cool, kind of funny looking Padre, no less. This was no Terry Kennedy or Eric Show. This guy had a fro and was running in an unathletic way with his butt high in the air, like and old man might run if his back hurt. Or like Terry Kennedy or Eric Show might run if they allowed the Topps photographer to shoot them on the basepaths.

This was my first introduction to Tony Gwynn and needless to say I was intrigued.

I sat staring at the card for a minute then flipped it over and looked at the statistics. Words like Walla Walla and Amarillo and Hawaii jumped out at me. Those places were so exotic I was only vaguely aware they were even places. What also jumped out at me were the high numbers under the .AVG column. That was one of the columns my Dad said was important. And this Tony guy was good in that category.

Pretty sure I stashed the card in the car and then went off to swim in the lake for the day. I'm not a huge fan of going to lakes to swim. I would much rather sit around looking at baseball cards.