There were several baseball questions from reporters at Don Sutton’s Hall of Fame press conference Tuesday, then someone asked: “Last year at this time, Don, you missed being inducted into the Hall of Fame by just nine votes. And at the time, you said, `The vote didn’t mean a thing. With no offense to the Hall of Fame or anyone who holds a key to it, it just wasn’t that big a deal.’ Is that accurate?” Sutton looked hard at the questioner. “Yes,” he said, straightforward. “But my wife, Mary, and I had just had a 2-pound daughter born to us 16 weeks early. The most important thing in the world for us then was the health of our baby. It didn’t matter to me then if every ballot for the Hall of Fame came up zeroes for me. Election to the Hall of Fame was just a byproduct of my job. Baseball was only a part of my life. It wasn’t my life. And Jackie was fighting for her life. Doctors had given her one chance in a hundred to live.” He smiled. “She made it,” he said, his voice softening. “She’s as stubborn as her mother.”
