Sutton’s place:
Hall of Famer remained true to his Pensacola-area roots, and those who greeted him from home, as he rose to Hall of Fame status.
The first meeting with Don Sutton is a memory forever cherished.
It was March 1988. Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida.
The former spring training home of the Los Angeles Dodgers. A shrine to their distinguished history in baseball, going all the way back to their days as the Brooklyn Dodgers.
This was an era when the bulk of Major League Baseball teams had spring training homes in Florida.
It was to be Sutton’s final year as a player. One last hurrah, a full-circle experience with the franchise, which signed him as a 19-year-old, junior college pitching prospect in 1964 for $15,000 and bonuses. That was considered decent money for signees back when baseball did not hold a draft.
Two years later he made his Major League Baseball debut with the Dodgers, launching a career that led into 1998 enshrinement into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
On this day in 1988, it was early into my rewarding tenure with the Pensacola News Journal. The pitch was to produce a life profile on Pensacola’s thenmost famous professional athlete.
A guy born in Clio, Alabama, whose family moved 25 miles south to Molino. As he modestly would relate that first meeting, he didn’t consider himself the best pitcher on his high school team that won the 1962 Class A state title under coach Pete McLeod.
From there he went all the way into baseball immortality as a four-time All-Star, World Series champion and one of just 24 pitchers in MLB history to have won 300 or more games.
All of this becomes more powerful now. I was shocked last week when first receiving news of Sutton’s passing. Sutton was 75. He was always full of life. This was a kick to the gut.
When Sutton came back to
this area, he was like the corner store owner who knew everyone else in town. He called Pensacola, Cantonment (where his high school was located) and Molino places where he went for therapy. It was home. He loved it. His therapy.
On that day in March 1988, Sutton could not have been more gracious. I had grown up reading about Dodgertown. Now I was in it.
He gave me a tour of the place. Took me in a lounge area in the complex where players hung out back in the day, played cards, told stories. On this day, I saw Sandy Koufax walk through.
And then Don Drysdale came to sit with us. Incredible.
I was so in awe. By then during the interview Sutton knew I was from Pittsburgh and a Pirates fan as a kid who got to see him pitch.
Sutton was a Pirates killer, back when the Pirates actually were good and fielded a team that frequently made the playoffs.
They had a lineup
Sutton
faced led by Roberto Clemente, a boyhood idol of mine, who was my generation’s Jackie Robinson as the first Latino superstar and now recognized as one of the greatest players of all time.
I had to ask Sutton how he frequently got Clemente out. He laughed and mentioned luck, but then explained his pitching philosophy that I never forgot.
“Whether it was him or anyone, I always assumed the batter was going to make contact,” he said. “I never thought strikeout. I just wanted to make sure when there was contact, the ball wasn’t hit hard and it would go somewhere where it could be caught.”
Yet from that powerful, simplistic approach, Sutton struck out at least 100 batters in 21 consecutive seasons. It is a feat matched only by Nolan Ryan, Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens.
From that memorable interview in Vero Beach, I had the pleasure of seeing Sutton many times upon his return to the Pensacola area. And once in Atlanta,
where I met with him in the Braves home broadcast booth that he made so famous in his second career.
Again, he was so accommodating.
Sutton was such a natural as a broadcaster. So smooth. So good at storytelling. Oftentimes so funny. He loved doing it.
Sutton was proud of his hometown region. Never was that more apparent than the final time I saw Sutton. He was part of the grand opening, several years ago, at the Ollie’s Bargain Outlet in Pensacola.
It was vintage Sutton. He knew everyone. Or he made it seem like he did. Remembered faces he had not seen in decades. So many laughs. It was who he is.
Daniel Venn, the Class AA Pensacola Blue Wahoos media relations director who grew up in Minnesota, remembered that he once sent Sutton one of the pitcher’s baseball cards. Sutton signed it and returned it.
I know everyone who grew up with Sutton, or competed against him, has a favorite Sutton
story. He touched a lives.
In Pensacola, he was the first who proved, as Sutton would say, “You can get there from here.” He went from youth baseball in Molino and nearby Gonzalez to the big leagues. To the World Series. To the Hall of Fame.
“He’s a guy who snuck up on you with his career. He was not an overpowering pitcher,” said Blue Wahoos owner Clint Studer, who grew up in Chicago and watched Sutton pitch. “But he was just so consistent.”
Sutton never won the Cy Young Award as the season’s best pitcher and only received votes for the award five times.
Yet he ranks in the top 15 all time in wins (324), shutouts, strikeouts, innings pitched and games played.
Sutton was a stickler for proper diet, the right kind of exercise. It led to him being one of the most durable pitchers of all time, pitching at least 200 innings in 21 of his 23 seasons.
The statistics are phenomenal. The person was even better.
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