Don Sutton Marquee Hall of Fame 1998

He took the ball as a starter 756 times, a total only Cy Young and Nolan Ryan have beaten. Across twenty-three seasons he went 324-256 with a 3.26 earned run average and struck out 3,574 hitters, seventh-most in major-league history. In twenty-two of those twenty-three seasons he made at least twenty starts.

Fifteen straight seasons belonged to the Dodgers, and he came back for a sixteenth in 1988. He still leads that franchise in wins with 233, in starts with 533 and in shutouts with 52. He led the National League in shutouts in 1972, with nine. He won twenty games once, twenty-one of them in 1976, and he never won a Cy Young Award.

After Los Angeles he pitched for Houston, Milwaukee, Oakland and California, then returned for a last half-season with the Dodgers in 1988, at forty-three. Four All-Star selections in twenty-three years is what the honors amount to. The writers needed five elections to admit him, in 1998, when he took 386 of 473 votes.