‘Mechanic’ Had Tools for the 300

Webster’s New International Dictionary defines mechanic as a manual worker or an artisan or of or relating to manual work, of the nature of or resembling a machine , especially in routine or automatic performance.

In major league baseball, they know whom this applies to: a tall, square-shouldered guy with these gray curls around his temple and these long arms and an imperious squint down the barrel of a 3-and-2 count with the game on the line.

Donald Howard Sutton is who. You look at Sutton and you imagine him sizing up the job at hand like a plumber with a wrench in his hand and a tool box at his feet, trying to decide which appliance the job calls for or whether a simple little tap on the pipes will do.

Donald Howard has been baseball’s plumber for 21 years. It’s been dark and dirty. But someone had to do it.

No one has done it any better. He comes to work, figuratively, wearing coveralls, carrying a lunch pail and a toolbox. He gets the job done and leaves the bill and goes home and then comes back and does it again the next day.

He should go into the Hall of Fame with a pair of pliers in his glove, or a wire snake hanging out of his pocket. They may have him do the windows.

You see, what he has done on the mound for 21 years has been precision work as skilled and crafted as cabinetry, or tool and die making. He has plugged leaks and put the wheels back on for more than one franchise.

A lot of pitchers ram their way into the Hall of Fame with a 100-m.p.h. fastball or one of those trick pitches that disappears on the way to the plate and is harder to hit than a Pick Six.

Don Sutton did it with somewhat less. True, he had this hellacious curveball, one of history’s best, that would break at right angles and could be thrown around the Empire State building or across Rhode Island and be over for a strike. But his other pitches were dime-store stuff. His fastball was only in the 88-m.p.h. range, and he didn’t even have a changeup till Andy Messersmith taught it to him.

But he got hitters out like tenpins. He was the best since Grover Cleveland Alexander for keeping the hitters off-balance, under-swinging or over-striding. Optometry couldn’t have found the hitters’ blind spots any better than Dr. Sutton.

“He finds a way to get you out,� Casey Stengel once grudgingly observed. “My men swing where they think the ball is, only it hasn’t been there lately. And sometimes, they’re late. He never tells anybody, you see. This disappoints them.�

The Mechanic won his 300th game the other night. Of all the thousands who have played this game, only 18 others have ever done that.

It is a performance that guarantees Cooperstown. It is also one that shocks baseball.

Some purists are aghast. To win 300 games, you should have a whole bunch of 20-win seasons. Sutton has one. You should have a nickname like the Big Train, or the Big Six, or Tom Terrific or Bullet Bob. The Express.

You call Sutton, Don. Or, if you’re in a hurry, Sut.

Still, there are 47 pitchers in the Hall of Fame. Thirty-three of them never won 300 games. Ten of them never won 200 games. One of them--Babe Ruth--never won 100.

Baseball is a game that reveres consistency, repetition. Back-to-back no-hitters don’t impress baseball. One-year careers, no matter how brilliant, do not stir the archeologists of the grand old game.

The classic example of baseball’s thinking can be seen in the time Willie Mays made an impossible, over-the-shoulder, out-of-this-world catch of a ball that had home run written all over it, going the wrong way 490 feet from home plate, and Charlie Dressen, in the dugout, was heard to growl: “I’d like to see him do that again!�

You cannot catch baseball’s highest accolade unless you can do it again--over and over. And over.

Don Sutton has done it. He was as dependable as sunrise, as effective as aspirin.

“You just had to give Sutton the ball,� the late Walt Alston, who managed him for years, used to say. “He was always in shape, always ready. He was a professional’s professional.�

He was one of the steadiest pitchers who ever lived. He seldom walked anybody he didn’t want to walk--or didn’t care if he did walk. Sutton, who had taught himself control by nailing a floor mat to his screen door at home and spotting his pitches on it, could paint a picture on home plate with his fastball.

He was around the plate so much that he has had a near-record 412 home runs hit off him. “My hanging fastball,� he says, laughing. Reporters used to approach him after a game to inquire innocently, “Sut, how do you hold your gopher ball--one seam or two?�

The first time I ever saw Don Sutton, he was an excited 20-year-old kid on the Tarmac of an airport in Vero Beach. He had just been told he was going West with the big club because Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax had been holding out.

The presumption was, when they returned, Sutton would go out.

Sutton never bought it. Sutton never sold himself short. Sutton never beat himself, on or off the field.

Sutton was a cocky kid of the “Here, hit this!� school of contemptuous pitching. Once, he absolutely shocked the great Willie McCovey by coming in with a 3-and-2 curveball with the bases loaded.

“Rookies who come in with a curveball in that situation should be taken out behind the woodshed,� McCovey growled.

Sutton is pleased to be on the high road to Cooperstown. But not necessarily surprised.

“We went to Cooperstown once to play the Hall of Fame game, and I looked around and I got goose bumps,� he said. “And I said to myself, ‘Someday I’d like to be here.’ Then, when I won my 210th game, and passed Don Drysdale with 209, more than any other Dodger, I knew I had a chance to make it. I knew Don would make it, and Dazzy Vance already had and he had 197 wins.�

As usual, Sutton had studied the percentages and knew what he had to throw. A 300. Typically he did it.

It is the one towering stat, but he has others: 58 shutouts, and only nine players, the likes of Walter Johnson, Cy Young and Mordecai Brown, have more; eight World Series games, five one-hitters, nine two-hitters.

He belongs with them, with history. As the baseball historian Bill James has it in his “Baseball Abstract� of 1986: “I’m not saying there is a player comparable to Sutton who is in the Hall of Fame, I’m saying there is no player comparable to Don Sutton who is not in the Hall of Fame. It isn’t that the Hall of Fame includes a pitcher who is somewhat less qualified but that it includes many pitchers who are nowhere near as well qualified.�