Pitcher Don Sutton borrowed from the farewell speech of the legendary Lou Gehrig. “I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” he said in an emotional climax to the annual Hall of Fame inductions Sunday.
Sutton led five new inductees into baseball’s hallowed ground. Also enshrined were Larry Doby, who integrated the American League; former AL President Lee MacPhail Jr.; George Davis, a premier shortstop from 1890-1909; and Bullet Joe Rogan of the old Negro leagues, a star pitcher who also batted cleanup.
A crowd estimated at 7,000 attended the three-hour ceremony held in a pasture. Sutton appeared to be the principal draw and apparently attracted many fans from Los Angeles. He pitched for the Dodgers during his first 15 seasons.
Sutton paid tribute to his father, who was in attendance. “He told me, `Son, if you have a dream it could come true, but you will have to work hard, or harder than anyone else.’ “
The senior Sutton provided his son with a wonderful example.
“I’ve never known a day when he didn’t get up and go to work,” Sutton said.
The younger Sutton was also a workaholic. Unbelievable as it may seem, he never missed a start during his 23-year major-league career.
A right-handed control pitcher, Sutton won 324 games, 12th on the all-time list, but didn’t receive enough votes until his fifth year on the ballot. More than likely, the fact that he only had one 20-win season accounts for the delay.
Still, he was a model of consistency and durability and struck out 3,574 batters while allowing only a third as many walks.
“He was very easy to work with,” said Jim Sundberg, one of his many catchers. “He had great control.”
Sutton, who pitched in four World Series and had five career one-hit games, told the fans, “I’ve wanted this (day) for 40 years.” Then he added, “So why am I shaking like a leaf?”
He began playing baseball and imitating major-league stars when he was 6 years old. “All my life I wanted to pitch in the big leagues.”
When he heard on radio broadcasts that pitcher Whitey Ford of the Yankees “was crafty, I wanted to know what `crafty’ meant.” He also said he “wanted to be like Robin Roberts” because Roberts was a control pitcher.
As a kid, he fantasized that he was Roberts, Ford, Mickey Mantle and Elston Howard. “When I got to the big leagues, I already had a thousand (fantasy) games of experience. But I didn’t tell anybody. Nobody knew it but me.”
During his 25-minute acceptance speech, Sutton thanked more than a dozen teammates and just about all of his managers. On former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley: “I thank him for building an organization on class and with a winning tradition.”
But the man who helped him the most, Sutton said, was Red Adams, whom he described as the “standard by which every pitching coach should be measured.”
Doby became the AL’s first black player in 1947, the same year Jackie Robinson broke the color line with the Dodgers. He downplayed his trouble with racists while in Cleveland, his first big-league club. “My family and I were treated with the greatest respect any man could want,” he said.
Doby also paid homage to the late Bill Veeck, who was operating the Cleveland Indians when he made his big-league debut.
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He also acknowledged the presence at the ceremony of Mary Frances Veeck, and said: “If it wasn’t for her husband, I might not be standing here. If somebody told me I’d be here today, I never would have believed it.”
Doby, who had a brief managerial career–with the White Sox when Veeck owned the club–choked up when he said, “What happened to me shows people can live together, play together and work together.”
Lee MacPhail is the first second-generation executive elected to the Hall of Fame. He had a 45-year front-office career that touched all the bases and included nine seasons as the AL president.