Someone sent me a message. “Tony Gwynn. 54.”

I first thought I was being told that he had a birthday, and the notion of him being 54 was the news. I was thinking, “I remember watching him play basketball for Long Beach Poly … and he’s 54 already?”

Then eventually it dawned on me, when I looked at the subject field. “Oh no”.

It was not a birthday.

And another American sports hero is gone.

Tony Gwynn may have been the most accessible great player in the history of baseball. I had no dealings with 95 percent of them, but it is hard to imagine anyone was more approachable.

The man won eight batting championships and amassed 3,141 hits. He had a career batting average of .338 and in the strike-shortened 1994 season he hit .394 — the highest batting average in Major League Baseball since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941.

Gwynn was a chubby left-handed hitter with a low center of gravity and a great eye. He was almost impossible to strike out, and he walked often enough to take his on-base percentage over .400 several times.

He had one of those effortless swings, never intent on hitting home runs (only 135 in his career), just putting the ball in play, or in a gap, and he had 543 doubles and 85 triples.

And even though he failed to get a hit nearly seven times out of 10 he went to bat, every time he walked to the plate you assumed he would get one. It seemed as if he had only to make the decision. “This time up, a single to center.”

If you want to see screens of impressive statistics, have a look at his Baseball Reference entry.

Gwynn died after a fight with salivary gland cancer.

He apparently believed his cancer came from his long use of chewing tobacco and, indeed, in my mind’s eye his cheek is bulging as he goes to the plate at the old Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. He played the whole of his career with the Padres, which is a credit to his patience, because the Padres were bad for most of his 20 seasons.

He played in the World Series twice, in 1984 and 1998, and the Padres lost eight of the nine World Series games he played in — though, predictably, he was not the problem, batting .371 in those nine games.

What made him impressive, to me as a journalist, was how easy he was to talk to.

The average superstar speaks as little as possible. He avoids the media. He does no more than the minimum. He’s just tired of it. He figures nothing good can come from it. He’s already on top of the game, and making great amounts of money.

Tony Gwynn, however …

A journo could walk up to him in the Padres clubhouse, and ask Tony Gwynn for a couple of minutes … and off he would go. He would talk about any baseball topic for almost as long as you could wish. And he said insightful, intelligent things. He never spoke in cliches.

What made his accessibility so special is that we normal humans never really get a chance to have a conversation with a superstar.

With Tony Gwynn, it was an everyday occurrence. He might not be able to explain exactly why he could hit .300 with his eyes closed, but he would take a crack at trying to describe it.

When I told the Yanks in the office, here at The National, each of them said something like, “Oh, no!”

“He wasn’t very old, was he?” “What a great hitter.”

One of them said: “Everyone dies. All my heroes are dead.”

Sometimes it feels like that.

We still have our memories of Tony Gwynn spanking a single into right field. About 2,000 times.

And we can hope that his death, probably years before its time, will serve as a warning to anyone still foolish enough to chew tobacco.