In the Dodger media guide listings of the franchise’s career pitching records, the name “Sutton, Don” is found atop the categories for wins, losses, games, games started, strikeouts, innings pitched, hits, walks, and shutouts. Accompanying the section is a photo with the caption, Don Drysdale’s name can be found throughout the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Career Top 10 lists.
And therein lies the invisibility of Don Sutton.
It’s not as if Sutton toiled in obscurity or faded into reclusiveness. He pitched more than 15 years in the media center that is Los Angeles, and then became a major league announcer the year after his 1988 retirement, mostly before a national cable TV audience for the Atlanta Braves. The Hall of Fame welcomed him after only a bit of hesitation in 1998. Yet you get a sinking feeling that Sutton is becoming more and more obscure in Dodger history.
So let’s refresh some memories. Those record-setting numbers for Los Angeles include 3,814 innings, 533 starts, 233 victories, 156 complete games (tied with Drysdale, who tops the list thanks only to the biases of alphabetical order), and 52 shutouts. For his major league career, which after 15 seasons with the Dodgers also included stops at Houston, Milwaukee, Oakland, and with the Angels, Sutton collected 5,2821/3 innings and 3,574 strikeouts—seventh all-time in each category. His 58 shutouts rank him 10th in major league history.
Pitcher Don Sutton’s 15-year career with the Dodgers puts him at the top of several “Best of ” lists in Dodgers history. His record-setting 156 complete games is tied with Don Drysdale, yet Sutton gets less recognition as a major league pitcher.
Sutton and left-handed contemporary Steve Carlton became eligible for Hall of Fame balloting in the same year, 1994. Carlton was elected with 436 votes (95.8 percent of total ballots), nearly twice as many as Sutton—even though, as Bill James pointed out in 1994’s The Politics of Glory, they had almost identical career innings pitched, wins, and ERA. Carlton struck out more but also walked more. Similarly to Carlton, Sutton’s more-than-respectable career ERA of 3.26 would have been lower if not for the 1,000-odd innings he threw in his late 30s and 40s.
What Sutton never seemed to have was the legendary season of someone like Carlton, who memorably won 27 games for a 59-win Phillies team in 1972 with a 1.97 ERA (182 ERA+). Sutton’s best year wasn’t anything to sneeze at, but his 2.08 ERA (161 ERA+) in ’72 was overshadowed by Carlton’s campaign and earned him only a fifth-place tie in the Cy Young voting, and his quest to win 20 games in a season seemed to take forever, partly because he was an established big-leaguer at age 21 and didn’t top the mark until 10 years later. Sutton had the kind of career that never had a no-hitter—merely five one-hitters and nine two-hitters. It’s possible that some remember Sutton more for his 1978 clubhouse fight with Steve Garvey or his rumored scuffing of the baseball than appreciate the overwhelming totality of his accomplishments. Though Sutton’s longtime reliability shouldn’t be undervalued, his greatness isn’t a byproduct of mere endurance.
As a rookie on a team that already featured Sandy Koufax at the height of his powers, Sutton immediately made himself a candidate for the Cooperstown pantheon. He struck out 209 batters, the most by a National League rookie in more than half a century. If the rest of Sutton’s career somehow seemed less than godlike, he nevertheless needs to be remembered as a Dodger immortal.