As a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers and four other major-league teams, Don Sutton won 324 games and earned a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
But he was better known in Atlanta for the work he did high above the pitcher’s mound, broadcasting Braves games on TV and radio for almost three decades.
Sutton, a big-league pitcher from 1966-88 and a Braves broadcaster for all but two years from 1989-2018, died in his sleep Monday night at age 75, according to his son.
“He worked as hard as anyone I’ve ever known,” Daron Sutton wrote on social media Tuesday, “and he treated those he encountered with great respect ... and he took me to work a lot. For all these things, I am very grateful. Rest In Peace.”
The Hall of Fame said Sutton died at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., “after a long battle with cancer.”
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of our dear friend, Don Sutton,” the Braves said in a statement. “A generation of Braves fans came to know his voice. ... But despite all (his) success, Don never lost his generous character or humble personality.”
Even when he was at the peak of his playing career with the Dodgers, Sutton aspired to someday be a broadcaster, specifically with the Braves. In 1976, when the Dodgers were playing at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Sutton casually mentioned at the end of an interview with Braves announcer Pete Van Wieren: “Someday, Pete, we’re going to work together.”
Sutton joined the Braves’ legendary broadcast team of Van Wieren, Skip Caray and Ernie Johnson Sr. when his playing career ended. Joe Simpson was added to the team’s broadcast lineup in 1992.
“So much credit for the success of the Superstation (TBS) rightfully goes to Ernie, Skip and Pete, but I think everybody forgets that Joe Simpson and Don Sutton were equally important in telling the stories of those great Braves teams (of the 1990s and beyond),” current Braves broadcaster Chip Caray said Tuesday.
As a broadcaster, Sutton became known for his extraordinary knowledge of the game, particularly pitching, and his ability to share that knowledge, often at length, with listeners and viewers. Fans could learn something new about baseball almost every time he called a game.
“Don was, shall we say, very strong in his opinions,” Chip Caray said. “He never backed down from what he thought was the right way things should be done in the game. He certainly was a man who stood on his principles. In analyzing pitching, there have been very, very few people that have ever done it better than he did.”
Credit: MARTY LEDERHANDLER
Credit: MARTY LEDERHANDLER
Sutton, who was born in Clio, Ala., and grew up in Molino, Fla., near Pensacola, once said he approached broadcasting as if he were having a conversation with relatives and friends across the Southeast. He was known to kick off his shoes in the broadcast booth, making himself comfortable as he talked about the game he loved.
He once described his affection for his second career in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “I’ve come to love broadcasting. I like broadcasting more than I liked being a player. I don’t like anything more than I liked being a pitcher; getting the ball and going (to the mound every fifth day) was the biggest charge. But four days out of five, broadcasting is more fun.”
Sutton was sidelined from Braves broadcasts after suffering a broken femur in his left leg in March 2019.
He was inducted into the Braves Hall of Fame in 2015 for his work as a broadcaster. Seventeen years earlier, in 1998, he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., for his pitching career.
The inscription on his plaque in Cooperstown reads in part: “A stalwart on the mound for 23 major league seasons. … Did not miss a turn in the starting rotation due to illness or injury. Consistency and model control led to 15 or more wins in 12 seasons and 100 or more strikeouts 21 times.”
Sutton’s 324 career wins are tied with Nolan Ryan for the 14th most in MLB history, and his 3,574 strikeouts are the seventh-most all-time. His 756 games started are the third most by a pitcher, trailing only Cy Young and Ryan, and his 58 shutouts are the 10th most. His career record was 324-256 with an ERA of 3.26.
Sutton, a right-hander, pitched his first 15 big-league seasons (1966-80) for the Dodgers, debuting as a 21-year-old rookie in a rotation that included future Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Sutton finished in the top five of the National League Cy Young Award voting in every season from 1972-76. He made the NL All-Star team four times in the 1970s.
He left the Dodgers as a free agent after the 1980 season, spending the next seven years with the Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland Athletics and California (now Los Angeles) Angels. He returned to the Dodgers for his final season at age 43 in 1988.
He pitched in four World Series, three with the Dodgers (1974, 1977 and 1978) and one with the Brewers (1982). His No. 20 is one of 10 uniform numbers retired by the Dodgers.
Long before he joined the Braves’ broadcast team, Sutton was one of their tougher opponents. In 67 games against the Braves, he posted a 35-17 record (his most wins against any opponent), a 2.72 ERA and 10 shutouts.
“I remember I hit a home run against Don the first time I faced him (in 1966),” Braves great Hank Aaron said decades later, “but I told somebody in the dugout that day, ‘This guy has a chance to win a lot of ballgames – he doesn’t back down.’ And I never had much more luck against him after that.”
Indeed, Aaron hit only two more home runs against Sutton in the nine years their National League careers overlapped.
Another former Braves star, Dale Murphy, had a career batting average of .179 in 59 plate appearances against Sutton and once said, “I enjoy him on the radio a lot more than I did facing him 60 feet, 6 inches away.”
Only a rare moment of fiscal restraint by Ted Turner in December 1980 kept Sutton from pitching for the Braves. A free agent, Sutton was interested in playing here, in part because of his interest in broadcasting someday. He flew into town for a meeting with Turner, the Braves’ owner, who surprisingly didn’t offer a competitive contract, perhaps because he had come under fire from fellow owners for a lucrative deal he gave free-agent outfielder Claudell Washington a couple of weeks earlier.
So Sutton signed with Houston, pitched eight more seasons, won 94 more games and then came to Atlanta as a broadcaster in 1989.
Sutton called Braves games every season from 1989 through 2006, then lost his job as part of a shakeup precipitated by Time Warner’s sale of regional network Turner South to Fox Cable Networks. Sutton worked on the Washington Nationals’ TV broadcast team in 2007 and 2008 before he was brought back to Atlanta to Atlanta as a Braves radio announcer in 2009.
An AJC.com poll before Sutton was rehired showed 90% of respondents in favor of his return.
“‘Welcome home’ – that has been the phrase I’ve heard most,” Sutton said at his first game back in the Braves’ booth.
Sutton continued on Braves radio through the 2018 season, meaning he had been part of the team’s TV or radio broadcasts for 28 of the past 30 seasons at that point. He planned to call 81 games in 2019 before the broken bone in his left leg, suffered days before what would have been his first broadcast of the year, sidelined him for the season.
It was the first time in more than a half-century Sutton spent a summer away from big-league ballparks.
“It’s driving me nuts not to be there,” he said in an August 2019 interview with the AJC.
Sutton described how the injury occurred at his Sandy Springs home: “I didn’t fall. I just stood up, took a step to the left, put all the weight on my left leg, and I heard a crack. It broke just above the knee. … And then there was some serious pain.”
Three days later, on his 74th birthday, he underwent surgery at Emory.
“I had to have a rod put into the femur and some screws and anchors to hold it in place,” Sutton said in the 2019 interview. “Right now, I’ve got so much hardware in my left leg that when it starts hurting, I don’t call the doctor. I call Home Depot.”
As his rehabilitation continued, and as the coronavirus pandemic shortened the 2020 season, Sutton didn’t make it back on to Braves broadcasts, although he did attend one game and visit his fellow announcers late in the 2019 season.
The long-time Dodger became very much a part of the Braves family, evidenced by his place in the team’s Hall of Fame. There was an outpouring of concern and support for Sutton when his daughter Jacqueline was born 16 weeks prematurely in 1996 and when he lost his left kidney to cancer in 2002 and again when the broken leg forced him off the air in 2019.
“The nicest thing that has been said is, ‘We miss you,’” Sutton told the AJC in 2019. “The best thing I can say is, ‘Not nearly as much as I miss being there.’”
Credit: Mike Stobe
Credit: Mike Stobe
