Sutton's prime was 1971 to 1980. Prior to 1971 Sutton was a promising but very erratic pitcher for the Dodgers, winning 66 and losing 73 over the five year period from 1966 to 1970 with an ERA of 3.45 (approximately 5% worse than the league average during the pitching dominated years of the late '60's). Sutton blossomed in 1971, going 17-12 with a 2.54 ERA, and proceeded to become a consistent winner for the Dodgers during the 1970's. Here are Sutton's statistics for the decade period 1971 to 1980 and Guidry's for the period 1977 to 1985 (including the strike shortened, 108 game 1981 season).

Sutton left the Dodgers after 1980 and began a peripatetic stretch of nine years, moving from Houston to Milwaukee to Oakland and then the Angels, before returning to L.A. for a valedictory season in 1988. Over these nine years Sutton won 94 and lost 81 (a .537 winning percentage) and had a 3.71 ERA (which translates to a 102 ERA+, about two percent better than the league average).
Don Sutton is in the Hall of Fame because he won 324 games, an outstanding achievement that I would never presume to minimize nor dismiss. But it is notable that nearly half of those career victories were won when Sutton was plainly not a Hall of Fame caliber pitcher and was either struggling to learn his craft early in his career or gamely hanging on by using guile and a redoubtable competitive drive to remain at the major league level long after most have retired.

While the standards for induction to the Hall of Fame are necessarily subjective and varied, it is safe to say that in the broadest sense we consider Hall of Famers to be simply the best baseball players of all time. And yet it is obvious that Sutton, for all his achievements, was never considered the best pitcher of his era, or even the best in his league at any given time. It is also obvious that even at his best Sutton was never the equal of Ron Guidry. If Sutton's sole qualification for the Hall of Fame is his tremendous number of career wins, then one must concede that among the subjective standards by which Hall of Famers are judged is an ironic and dubious regard for sustained mediocrity.

I do not mean to demean Don Sutton or argue that he is unworthy of the Hall. Sutton is far from alone as a player whose Hall of Fame credentials are based more on longevity than excellence. My purpose is only to suggest that excellence sustained over the better part of a decade is at least as worthy of consideration for the Hall of Fame as lofty career statistical achievements compiled over careers of 20 years or more during which a player was too frequently merely average or slightly above average. The Hall of Fame voters seem to agree in principle, as evidenced by Koufax and Dean and Greenberg and Kiner, among others, but in practice the Guidrys still stand at a distinct disadvantage to the Suttons in Hall of Fame balloting.