Don Sutton

Donald Howard Sutton grew up in a tarpaper shack in Clio, Alabama, where his father Charlie sharecropped and his mother Lillian was 15 when Don was born. The boy played imaginary games in the yard, acting out the lineups of Yankee teams he heard on transistor radio, and his mother worried because she didn't recognize the names of any of his friends. "She didn't know a Mickey, or a Whitey, or a Yogi, or a Moose, or an Elston," Sutton said at his Hall of Fame induction, "but I played with them every day." Sutton won 324 games across 23 seasons, struck out 3,574 batters, threw 58 shutouts, pitched 756 starts without going on the disabled list until his final year, and spent his entire career under suspicion of doctoring baseballs with sandpaper he may or may not have hidden in his glove. When umpires searched his pockets, they found slips of paper reading "NOT HERE" and "YOU'RE GETTING WARMER." The BBWAA elected Sutton to the Hall of Fame in 1998 on 81.6 percent of the ballot, on his fifth try.

Clio

Sutton was born on April 2, 1945, in Clio, Alabama. His family moved to Molino, Florida, when he was five, and a sixth-grade teacher named Henry Roper, a former minor leaguer, taught him the curveball. Sutton attended Gulf Coast Community College and Whittier College and signed with the Dodgers, debuting on April 14, 1966, at 20, joining a rotation that included Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Claude Osteen. He struck out 209 batters as a rookie, the most by an NL first-year pitcher since Grover Cleveland Alexander in 1911.

Sutton pitched his best season in 1972, going 19-9 with a 2.08 ERA, nine shutouts, and 18 complete games, and he led the NL in WHIP at 0.913. He won the 1977 All-Star Game MVP after throwing three scoreless innings at Yankee Stadium. In a mid-1974 slump so severe he went two months without a win, Sutton visited a Los Angeles hypnotist named Arthur Ellen despite his Evangelical Christian skepticism and credited the sessions with restoring his confidence. He went 13-1 with a 2.17 ERA over his final 17 starts that year.

The Mechanic

The scuffball accusations followed Sutton throughout his career and produced some of the finest gamesmanship in the history of pitching. Opponents called him "Black and Decker" and "The Mechanic" because they believed he scuffed baseballs with sandpaper concealed in his glove. He was ejected once, by umpire Doug Harvey on July 14, 1978, at St. Louis, but NL President Chub Feeney declined to impose the standard suspension after Sutton's lawyer visited. When umpires searched his person on other occasions, the slips of paper they found became part of the legend. Sutton, like Gaylord Perry, understood that the accusation was a weapon regardless of whether the pitch was loaded. Hitters who believed the ball was doctored swung differently than hitters who trusted it.

On August 20, 1978, at Shea Stadium, teammate Steve Garvey confronted Sutton after Sutton told reporters that Reggie Smith, not Garvey, was the team's best player. They fought and were separated, and UPI's Milton Richman described it as "concentrated fury amounting to almost homicidal desire to tear one another apart."

Sutton reached his 3,000th strikeout on June 24, 1983, fanning Alan Bannister of Cleveland, and won his 300th game on June 18, 1986, at Anaheim Stadium, a complete-game three-hitter against Texas. He was the 19th pitcher in history to reach the milestone, and he overcame a 9.12 ERA in his first five starts that season to get there. He pitched for the Dodgers, Astros, Brewers, Athletics, and Angels across 23 seasons and holds the record for most career at bats (1,354) without hitting a single home run.

Rancho Mirage

Sutton spent 17 years as a Braves broadcaster on TBS and Braves radio, partnering with Jim Powell, and was inducted into the Atlanta Braves Hall of Fame in 2015 for his broadcasting contributions. He battled kidney cancer (diagnosed 2002, left kidney removed) and had part of a lung removed in 2003, and he broke his femur in 2019 and never returned to the booth. When he fell nine votes short of the Hall of Fame in 1997, his two-month-old daughter Jacqueline was in neonatal ICU after being born 16 weeks premature. He said the Hall vote "was not that important" under the circumstances.

Sutton died in his sleep on January 19, 2021, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, at 75. "With apologies to Lou Gehrig," he said at Cooperstown, "I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have everything in life I've ever wanted."