If John Kruk could’ve bought stock shares in Jackson Merrill’s baseball career late Wednesday morning, he would’ve loaded up.

“Jackson Merrill is going to be fine,” Kruk said.

A Phillies broadcaster, Kruk had seen Merrill’s career-worst hitting funk deepen in the previous two games in San Diego. The results left the 23-year-old Padres center fielder with a .194 batting average and .309 slug rate at the season’s one-third mark.

Kruk wasn’t concerned about it.

“I still think he’s going to be an unbelievable player,” Kruk said, not long before Wednesday’s first pitch.

From Kruk’s lips to Merrill’s bat.

Merrill hit a single and a double off Phillies ace Cristopher Sánchez, and in his next game, a tie-breaking home run in the 7-5 road win Friday against the Nationals.

Kruk batted .300 in a 10-year career that began with the Padres in 1986. While with the Phillies, he made three straight All-Star teams and went to the 1993 World Series, batting .316 with a .430 on-base percentage that season. Kruk retired in 1995 due to health issues.

Kruk, 65, said he’s indebted to Tony Gwynn’s example-setting and advice, and believes Gwynn’s general reminders could assist Merrill, among many other ballplayers.

A small-town West Virginian, Kruk roomed with Gwynn, a San Diego State graduate, in Walla Walla, Wash., during each player’s first minor league season. Both Padres draftees batted left-handed and had inside-out strokes. They enjoyed making each other laugh.

Kruk said the future first-ballot Hall of Famer’s wisdom contributed to his reaching the big leagues and having a good rookie year, followed by a very good second season. Other pointers from Gwynn, said Kruk, helped him come out of a tailspin that began in his third season with the Padres and spilled over into the next year, leading Jack McKeon to deal him to the Phillies.

“The year after I hit 20 home runs,” Kruk said of his second season, in which power numbers soared throughout the big leagues and Kruk sent 19 opposite-field drives over the wall, “I was told by some people in the front office I’ve got to start pulling the ball. And I hit .240 that year, and I hit a boatload of ground balls to second base – and Tony read me the riot act.”

Kruk said he got away from his “natural swing” — a line-drive stroke he’d developed in playing as a teen on an all-dirt field that had no fence.

“Back then,” he said, “it did me no good to hit a ball (high) in the air because outfielders were playing as deep as they wanted.”

Gwynn advised Kruk to return to his hitting roots.

Don’t get happy with homers, he told him. Get your hits. The homers will come.

Athleticism was another driver of Kruk’s baseball success that Gwynn appreciated.

Kruk wasn’t everyone’s image of an athlete. He carried more jiggly weight than most ballplayers do. He smoked cigarettes and ate hot dogs. He quipped often that he was a ballplayer, not an athlete.

But Gwynn saw that Kruk could move well enough. He wasn’t surprised that Kruk had played quarterback and point guard at his high school, and had batted .650 as a senior on the baseball team.

“He said to me: ‘You’re an athlete. Be athletic,’” Kruk said. “And I never figured that out until he said that. Then I started thinking, football made me a better basketball player, basketball made me a better baseball player. Why don’t I go back to being an athlete instead of a robot?”

Kruk got back on track after the Phillies traded for him during his fourth season following the recommendation of third-base coach Larry Bowa, whom McKeon had fired and replaced as Padres manager two months earlier.

Kruk said Gwynn fed him scouting reports on non-Padres pitchers, benefiting his career with the Phillies.

Merrill may not need any pointers. But in this information-saturated era of baseball, Gwynn’s advice to Kruk about leaning into his athleticism should apply to Merrill, who got drafted as a shortstop and made a smooth conversion to center field as a big-league rookie.