Sutton Needs No Radar--300th in Sight : Pitcher Has Opted for Slow Lane, Detours and Corners on Road to, Yes, Cooperstown

Pity the boys in Cooperstown who one day will have to find an unoccupied corner in the Hall of Fame for Angel pitcher Don Sutton.

Nothing against Sutton, a fine man with a quick smile and a firm handshake, not to forget 295 victories (and counting), but what’s a curator to do?

Five more wins and Sutton becomes only the 19th pitcher in major league history to reach 300 victories. Great. Ta-da. Then what? There’s only so much you can do with a display that features a jersey and before-and-after-perm shots.

Even Sutton himself has referred to his methods as “methodical, boring--not spectacular.”

Here is a man only a handful of games from baseball immortality, and still you need a search party to find evidence of his doings. Sutton folklore? Forget it. One season with 20 or more victories. No overpowering fastball. No no-hitters. No led-the-league-in-strikeouts. Or wins. Or complete games. Or winning percentage. Wait, in 1980 he managed to finish first in the National League in earned-run average, but that’s about it for the stunning statistics. Cookbooks have more interesting reading.

Star appeal is in short supply, too. In Houston, you need only to see the Astro catcher stuffing sponges, Sealy mattresses, whatever, into his cushioned mitt to know that fastballer and future Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan is scheduled to pitch that night.

In New York, they drape cardboard K’s over stadium rails when the electric Dwight Gooden of the Mets records another strikeout.

In Anaheim, fans must be tempted to unveil ?’s, as in how does Sutton, who will be 41 next Wednesday, do it? His fastball is in name only, his curveball does what it’s told--most of the time--and his slider is efficient but certainly not the league’s best.

When Sutton pitches, you don’t know whether to watch or do your tax returns. No-Doz becomes the concessionaire’s best seller. Scouts click their radar guns off.

But after six or seven innings of this, of Sutton tickling corners and tempting fate, you glance at the scoreboard and usually see the other team with a lot of zeroes on its side.

Yes, here is Sutton again, doing what even he said a year ago that he couldn’t do, that is, pitching for 300 wins and a ticket to the Hall of Fame. Even better, after years of trade requests to Southern California, his family and Laguna Hills home are only about 20 miles from the Anaheim Stadium pitcher’s mound, which is nice if you like to remember the names of your wife and children.

And so what if this is the quietest 295 wins this side of Pud Galvin. The last five should be worth the wait.

“I’m pretty much a mechanic--a pretty good one, but I’m a mechanic,” he says. “I just like to know there’s a category for a Phil Niekro, a Ferguson Jenkins, a Tommy John, guys like that. I would have never been a (Sandy) Koufax, a (Tom) Seaver, a (Steve) Carlton. They’re more dominating personalities, and they have more dominating presence on the mound. They’re in a class of their own at the top.”

Sutton has had his moments. The problem is remembering them.

For example, the Dodgers recently announced they plan to honor Sutton in a pregame ceremony April 5 when the Angels come to Dodger Stadium for the Freeway Series. That’s nice, since it has been only six years since he became the all-time winningest Dodger pitcher, as well as establishing records for most games pitched, most starts, most strikeouts, most innings pitched and shutouts. Did someone just remind them of Sutton’s resume?

All he has done since leaving the Dodgers in 1980 is win another 65 games. In all, he has accumulated more strikeouts than Lefty Grove, Christy Mathewson, Bob Feller or Warren Spahn, not to forget Koufax and Don Drysdale.

Ceremony? The Dodgers should issue an apology.

OK, so the tread is showing a bit on Sutton’s right arm and the paint’s peeling here and there. You expected the same 20-year-old rookie that first buttoned a Dodger uniform in Vero Beach?

Sutton is a changed man, all right. For openers, he’s happy, which, in the saga of Sutton, is half the battle. No longer does he earn a living in Oakland or Milwaukee while his family resides in Southern California. That all stopped when the Angels acquired Sutton from the A’s last September.

Then there is this business of 300 wins. After the 1984 season, when the Brewers traded him to Oakland, Sutton said he would retire before throwing a pitch for the A’s. Nothing personal, said Sutton, but it was the San Diego Padres, the Angels and, get this, the Dodgers, or nothing. Sutton was tired of coming home and noticing that his family needed fingerprints to confirm his arrival.

At the time, he was 20 wins away from the magical 300.

No matter. Out of his mouth came these words: “Anyway, it’s not worth it to leave home for another year.”

Which goes nicely with a comment he made near the end of the 1984 season, 21 victories from direct entry to the Hall of Fame. “For a while, (winning 300 games) was an obsession with me,” he said. “Now I’m not obsessed with winning 300 ballgames because I’m pretty much convinced it’s not possible, or maybe not probable--one of the two.”

So here was Sutton, vowing to hold his breath and turn Dodger blue before reporting to the A’s. Of course, that didn’t last long, and Sutton won 13 games for Oakland before coming to the Angels and winning another two games.

“That was the reality of the moment,” he says now. “First of all, I wasn’t sure I’d be playing. Secondly, I guess, when you’re 40, logically 20 wins can be a long, long way off. But I think last year turned out to be a great year. The only downside on last year was that it wasn’t at home.”

You can’t have everything. Or can you? In your race for last laughs, Sutton appears to be winning. Sure, he had to wait 21 seasons for the guffaws, but it seems worth the trouble. He’s rich. He’s home. He’s happy.

Already Sutton has tried preparing for the moment he wins his 300th game. That’s like him.

Sutton asked former Angel first baseman Rod Carew how it felt after Carew got his 3,000th hit and did the same thing when Reggie Jackson hit his 500th home run. “I wanted to know,” Sutton says. “I was interested in how each of those persons responded to those accomplishments.”

Seaver, who won his 300th game during the 1985 season, also heard from Sutton. So did Niekro.

“Seaver said it was a little more emotional than he thought it would be,” Sutton says. “Niekro said now he could stop flying his family in and out of town every day.”

In a change of pace, Sutton also realized that such advance work isn’t necessary. “I think it would be stupid to try,” he says. Rather than dissect the feeling, Sutton has decided to let it sweep over him like a wave. He figures he has it coming.

Why not? Ever since he joined the major leagues, Sutton has played egghead. Sutton didn’t just pitch, he analyzed. Everything had a reason. You didn’t throw a curveball on a 3-and-2 count because it seemed like a nice idea. You threw it because it was the thing to do.

That sort of thinking isn’t as glamorous as a 100 m.p.h. fastball, but it’s just as effective.

“(Sutton) knew he wasn’t an overpowering pitcher,” says Red Adams, a former Dodger pitching coach and now an instructor in the team’s minor league organization. “He knew he had an outstanding breaking ball, great control. But he had to learn the hitters throughout the league. He did that and, goddarn it, he’s still doing it. I mean, if you could order your stuff out of a catalogue, you’d want the great fastball. That’s what you’d do. But most of them are dealing with what they have. I don’t know of anyone who has done a better job with what he has than Don.”

Adams has known Sutton since he was a rookie with the Dodgers. So has Angel Manager Gene Mauch, who was managing the Philadelphia Phillies in the ‘60s. Back then, Sutton wore a crew cut and pitched like his daily bread depended on it.

In a way, it did. He spent his first season in Santa Barbara and then Albuquerque before earning a place on the Dodger roster in 1966. That was the spring in which Koufax and Drysdale decided to skip camp because of contract difficulties.

On his 21st birthday, Sutton pitched in an exhibition game at Mesa, Ariz., against the San Francisco Giants. Willie McCovey stepped to the plate and settled into the batter’s box. McCovey, whose back is so broad you need directions to get from one shoulder blade to the next, promptly hit a Sutton pitch into the ozone layer. As best as Sutton can recall, the ball still may be rising.

The home run didn’t do serious damage to Sutton’s chances, though it would be a while before his ego became comfortable with the idea of a baseball seemingly leaving the earth’s atmosphere. Without Koufax and Drysdale in attendance, Sutton and Bill Singer were receiving plenty of attention.

“Had they been there, I don’t think I would have got as many innings,” Sutton says. “Singer and I got 40-plus innings, which is virtually unheard of in spring.”

Sutton returned to the minors for a brief stay in 1968. He was back with the Dodgers in time to win 11 games and finish with a 2.60 ERA.

“When he came to the league he was very careful,” Mauch says. “He was almost like a scientist. He’d walk people. He was almost trying to overpitch.

“Then he went to another extreme and he started challenging hitters. That’s when he became a winning pitcher.”

Mauch likes to talk about pitching and “power zones.” Sutton, Mauch says, has the ability to throw a pitch just outside or inside of a batter’s power zone. Sounds simple, but Mauch says you’re talking about an inch here or there.

“(Sutton) knows when the hitter is anxious, he knows how to pitch to guys,” he says. “You can’t teach that.”

But that isn’t all what makes Sutton special, says Mauch. “It’s because he wins and wins and wins and wins.”

As for this speed-gun mentality, the faster-is-better thinking that sometimes exists, Sutton never has been much of a disciple. He has followers.

“There’s been a lot of guys with great stuff for a year, two years,” Angel catcher Bob Boone says. “But the special ones keep having it year in and year out. With Don, you just pencil him on your roster. You know he’s going to be there.”

You also should know that Sutton has a reputation for sleight of hand, which is nice way of saying he doctors the ball. Proving it, of course, is an entirely different task.

It’s like the movie where the guy is asked if he’s ever been convicted of a felony.

“Convicted?” the man says. “No, never convicted.”

Umpires have tried to catch Sutton. Time was when they would search Sutton’s uniform only to find handwritten notes saying to look elsewhere.

Maybe the rumors are false. Maybe Sutton doesn’t purposely scuff a baseball.

“C’mon, they throw out a ball of his, you look at it and say, ‘Heh, there’s only a four-inch incision--hmmm,” says Greg Minton, the veteran reliever for the San Francisco Giants.

But even in alleged tomfoolery, Sutton manages to earn respect.

“I’m not going to knock any pitcher who can come up with something to get the hitters out,” Minton says. “I’m a pitcher and I love it. I didn’t much appreciate it when he did it against us, but he got away with it and he still does. He only uses it at the right times. More power to him.”

From 1969 to the day the Dodgers decided not to renew his contract, Sutton never won fewer than 12 games each season. For one reason or another, that wasn’t good enough.

Of course, it didn’t help that Sutton wasn’t a card-carrying member of the Tom Lasorda Fan Club, or that he engaged in a locker-room wrestling match with Steve Garvey, who, at the time, served as a Dodger icon.

Nor was it an advantage to wedge your round personality into a square hole, as Sutton tried shortly after finding himself in the land of cutups and cards.

“I think I came into the major leagues thinking that the guy who went to the park first and stayed the longest, who worked the hardest, would be the best liked, best known and best paid,” Sutton says. “That’s not necessarily true. I think we all want our strokes, but they’re translated in different ways. It took me a long time to realize that I was never going to be the most popular player or the best liked, but I would be very content to be one of the most dependable and most respected.

“We’re in the entertainment business, which is an extrovert’s world, and I’m not an extrovert,” he says.

Sutton once attempted a personality change while with the Dodgers. “An organization of extroverts,” he says. He would become one of the guys, Mr. Happy and all that. He now refers to those years as “a masquerade.”

“I think that if I had understood me more and if they had understood me more, I’d probably still be a Dodger,” Sutton says.

Houston acquired Sutton in 1981. That was fine, if you like watching people play baseball in rainbows. Next it was on to Milwaukee, where he helped the Brewers into the World Series. Oakland called next, and then came the Angels, who have signed him through this season with an option year in 1987. For this, they pay Sutton a guaranteed salary of about $500,000 plus incentives tied to the number of games started. Even at age 41, that’s money in the bank for Sutton, who rarely misses his turn.

Soon, most likely before the All-Star break, Sutton should have his 300th win safely tucked away. It would be nice if it came in the form of a no-hitter or a shutout. Drama would be served.

Then again, why tinker with success? Maybe the scorecard should be filled with ho-hum 6-to-3s or routine pop flies. Just make sure it ends with Sutton’s favorite letter: W.