1971 O-Pee-Chee Don Sutton #361 Los Angeles Dodgers

Description

1971 O-Pee-Chee Don Sutton #361 Los Angeles Dodgers Anchoring any vintage Dodgers binder with bona fide Cooperstown royalty, the 1971 O-Pee-Chee Don Sutton #361 Los Angeles Dodgers card captures the future Baseball Hall of Famer entering the prime of his legendary twenty-three-year Major League career. Posed hands-overhead against a chain-link spring training backdrop in his iconic number 20 home flannel with a crisp Don Sutton facsimile signature across his jersey, this scarce Canadian-printed black-bordered star card hails from O-Pee-Chee's coveted first full 752-card baseball set. Because O-Pee-Chee production runs in London, Ontario were dramatically smaller than American Topps printings and notoriously unforgiving on full-bleed black borders, well-centered Hall of Fame singles from 1971 remain blue-chip centerpiece targets for vintage baseball collectors across Canada and the United States. Fresh off logging 260 innings with 15 victories and 201 strikeouts for Los Angeles in 1970, Sutton stood on the brink of his brilliant 1971 campaign where he posted a sparkling 2.54 ERA to lead the Dodgers staff. Across sixteen seasons in Dodger blue and twenty-three Major League seasons overall, the right-handed master craftsman set an unmatched standard for durability, never once landing on the disabled list while compiling 324 career wins, 58 shutouts, and 3,574 strikeouts, a monumental strikeout total that still ranks seventh in Major League history. Even within a storied pitching franchise graced by Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser, and Clayton Kershaw, Sutton stands atop all-time Los Angeles Dodgers franchise leaderboards in wins with 233, innings pitched with 3,816.1, games started with 533, and shutouts with 52. A four-time All-Star, 1977 All-Star Game MVP at Yankee Stadium, and rotation ace on four National League pennant winners, Sutton saw his uniform number 20 retired by the Dodgers alongside his 1998 induction into Cooperstown, while a whole new generation of fans grew up loving his dry wit across nearly three decades of national Atlanta Braves broadcasts on Superstation TBS. Turning the card over confirms an authentic Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back printed in black ink on yellow cardstock rather than a puzzle back, featuring French and English accounts of his 1966 Sporting News NL Rookie Pitcher of the Year award, career pitching stats, and the Printed in Canada stamp. High-resolution scan inspection highlights superb near-dead-center framing at approximately 48/52 left-to-right and 50/50 top-to-bottom on the front, matched by balanced 48/52 alignment on the bright yellow back. Both sides remain clean, vibrant, and completely free of creases, surface wrinkles, stains, or writing. Conservative grading accounts for soft rounding with visible white fiber wear on both bottom corners, smaller white touches at both upper corners, and light white edge flecking along the bottom and upper-right black borders, establishing a solid raw EX 5 estimate. Grade Estimate: EX 5