He holds the Dodger team records not only for career wins but also for strikeouts (2,696), starts (533), shutouts (52), home runs surrendered (309) and losses (181).
“I never wanted to be a superstar or the highest-paid player,” Sutton told Baseball Digest in 1985. All he wanted, he said, was to be “consistent, dependable, and you could count on me.”
Donald Howard Sutton was born on April 2, 1945, in Clio, Ala., a small city in the southwest part of the state. His father, Charlie Howard Sutton, was a sharecropper who later worked in construction and became a concrete expert. His mother was Lillian (McKnight) Sutton. The Suttons moved to Molino, in the Florida panhandle, when Don was 5.
Sutton learned to throw a curveball before his 13th birthday. He excelled in high school and pitched at Gulf Coast Community College, in Panama City, Fla., and Whittier College in California before signing with the Dodgers as an amateur free agent in 1964.
His 23-7 record for the Dodgers’ Class A and Double A minor-league teams in 1965 led to his promotion to the major leagues the next season.
As a rookie, he had a 12-12 record with a 2.99 earned run average but did not pitch in the World Series, when the Baltimore Orioles swept the Dodgers in four games. Eight years later, he had two victories over the Pittsburgh Pirates when the Dodgers won the 1974 National League Championship Series, and one in the Dodgers’ World Series loss to Oakland.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Sutton had known he wanted to pitch from childhood.

Source: New York Times

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