this is a great article from '97
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/1997/weekly/970728/gwynn.html
Fifteen years to the day on which he played his first major league game, San Diego Padres outfielder Tony Gwynn hunches over a small monitor propped up on a battered blue steamer trunk in the visitor's clubhouse of Miami's Pro Player Stadium, studying a video of his batting stroke—the sweetest swing since Glenn Miller's. Land softly on the front foot ... cock the top hand slightly toward the pitcher ... stay back ... pow! The checkpoints are as constant as the engraved notches on a dipstick. Gwynn, having had one hit in five at bats the previous night against the Florida Marlins, is half a quart low. "I'll fix it," the master mechanic says. The checkup is unremarkable except for this: 2,037 games after his debut he was at work last Saturday more than six hours before game time, well ahead of coaches, rookies and vendors.
With a .388 average at week's end, Gwynn seems certain not only to improve his career average for a fifth straight season, raising it from .329 to .339 over that span, but also to extend the best run of hitting the game has seen by someone at such an advanced age. Gwynn has batted .371 over the past five years, beginning with 1993 when he turned 33. Only five players—and none since '31—have had a better five-year average, and all five, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, George Sisler, Harry Heilmann and Al Simmons, began their runs in their 20s.
None of those Hall of Famers from before the era of expansion and of specialized relief pitching endured the grind Gwynn did last week. Beginning on July 13, Gwynn played six games in six days in four time zones against four teams in which he faced 16 pitchers in 28 plate appearances. That is why comparing hitters from different eras is a waste of time. A hitter is more accurately measured against his peers, those players hitting under the same conditions. By that yardstick—batting average measured against contemporaries—Gwynn is the best hitter since Williams and the sixth best hitter of all time . He has batted .0789 better than all other major leaguers combined during his career, a margin exceeded among players with 2,500 hits by only Cobb (.1029 better than his peers), Williams (.0841), Hornsby (.0810), Nap Lajoie (.0806) and Willie Keeler (.0794).
"O.K., that idea makes sense," Gwynn says, "but I don't care what the numbers say. Am I better than Hank Aaron? Stan Musial? Frank Robinson? Not a chance. The only thing I want people to say about me is that I played the game the way it should be played. What I've always wanted to do is be a complete player. This is as close as I've ever come to it."