Sutton Winning Daily in the Game of Life : He Takes Failure to Make Baseball’s Hall in Stride While Celebrating Infant Daughter’s Fragile Life

Don Sutton somehow does not qualify for the Hall of Fame, again. He won 324 games in the big leagues and pitched 58 shutouts. He won more games than Phil Niekro, who was elected to the Hall Monday (Jan. 6), lost fewer games. Niekro goes to Cooperstown anyway. He celebrated his election Monday night. Don Sutton went to the nursery intensive care unit of Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital, watched his infant daughter make it to the end of another day. He celebrated her fragile life.

“Every day is a victory,” Don Sutton said.

His wife, Mary, gave birth to Jacqueline Kort Sutton in early November. The baby’s birth was four months premature. She weighed 1 pound and 5 ounces and was given one chance in 100 by doctors that she could survive. At birth, the baby did not have the strength to even cry, to make any sound at all.

The Suttons were not even allowed to hold their daughter until she was a month old. They were finally doing that by Christmas. At the Christmas party for Sutton and the other Atlanta Braves broadcasters, Sutton told friends he planned to celebrate with what he called a “two-pound party” when Jacqueline made that weight.

By Monday, when Sutton hoped to celebrate the Hall of Fame, the baby’s weight was up to 2 pounds and 9 ounces. Sutton lost another chance at Cooperstown Monday, because not enough baseball writers, the ones who vote on these things, have enough taste or common sense. But Sutton, with 324 victories in the books already, saw his daughter make it through another day. Sometimes you win even when you lose.

“Believe me,” Sutton told his agent Lonnie Cooper after they had both found out Sutton had come up nine votes short of the Hall of Fame, “as disappointed as I am, I will keep this in perspective tonight.”

And then he prepared to be at Piedmont Hospital in the intensive care unit with his wife and a tiny child with a strong will to live, one with no neurological damage and what has been an amazing resistance to infection, at least so far. There are still no guarantees for her survival. If she lives, doctors expect her to be in the hospital until March. But she made it to 2 pounds, she made it through Christmas, now into a new year. She is more than two months old now, after doctors thought she would not last a week.

Don Sutton was upset about the Hall of Fame Monday night and had a right to be upset, after 23 years in the big leagues, after a lifetime earned run average of 3.25. He was upset because he has earned his way into the Hall, because there are a ton of pitchers with fewer victories in there ahead of him, because he had a long and elegant and distinguished career, because in his lifetime only Warren Spahn and Steve Carlton have more victories than he does.

But he would keep it all in perspective, this year more than the other years. He hopes to be able to tell Jacqueline Kort Sutton all about this someday, when he finally makes the Hall, and she is old enough to understand. That would be some day for both of them, down the road.

“Each day she is with us lowers the risk,” Lonnie Cooper said last night. “The doctors become more optimistic, and so do we all.”

Cooper paused and said, “We were just expecting this day would be a little brighter than the rest for Don.”

You are supposed to go into the Hall with 3,000 hits and you are supposed to go in with 300 victories. Phil Niekro made it, Sutton still waits. Sometimes when baseball writers want to defend a pick, they scream “Look at the numbers.” When they keep Sutton out of the Hall, they say, “Numbers aren’t everything.” Sometimes this all seems as trivial as the Golden Globe Awards, even as voters act as if they are defending the Vatican. Don Sutton got a bad deal Monday. Another one. He is not the first who has had to wait. Phil Rizzuto waited a lifetime before finally making it to the podium at Cooperstown. It is still a bad deal for Sutton.

Niekro goes in at 318-274 and Sutton stays out at 324-256. They should have gone in together. Sutton should have been able to take good news with him to Piedmont Monday night.

“There has never been anything in my life,” Sutton told a friend last week, “that has occupied me this way for every waking hour of my life.”

For two months, there have been two trips to the hospital a day. Sometimes one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Sometimes Don and Mary Sutton wait and make their second trip at night, between 7:30 and 8 o’clock. They know every restaurant even close to Piedmont Hospital. They have been to every one. Another restaurant, another day for their daughter. The next milestone for the baby, attached to tubes and wires in an incubator that simulates the womb, is 3 pounds, hopefully before she is three months old.

This is Sutton’s season now, this long season of waiting in the hospital. For a few hours Monday night he was supposed to be a baseball pitcher again, going all the way back to when he was Rookie of the Year with the Dodgers in 1966. But he did not get the votes. He did not go back to the hospital as a Hall of Famer Monday night. Just a parent.