The National Baseball Hall of Fame officially receives an honored guest named Carsten Charles Sabathia this weekend. Known as CC. He was a great Yankee, one of the best left-handed pitchers they have ever had or will ever have, the ace of the staff, a true ace of his sport, on the last Yankee team to win the World Series. It was a Series they had no chance of winning without him. In every way, CC was there when they needed him.
But as much of a star as he was that year, and across so many of the 11 seasons he would spend with the Yankees, perhaps the most lasting measure of the pitcher he was and the person he was and the teammate he was came before he came to New York. It all happened in Milwaukee in 2008, when he became one of the most important trade deadline acquisitions there has ever been when he was pitching the Brewers back to the postseason for the first time in 26 years.
Everyone knew he was merely an expensive rental in Milwaukee. Everyone knew CC was about to get paid big as a free agent, and he sure did get paid by the Yankees, $161 million over seven years. And all he did for the Brewers after being traded to them on July 7 was pitch in a way that reminded you of the old Jimmy Connors line about Rafael Nadal:
CC pitched as if he was broke.
He made 17 starts. His record would end up being 11-2. His ERA would end up being 1.65. He pitched three shutouts and then, when it was all on the line for the Brewers down the stretch, he pitched on short rest even though the people representing him, knowing the kind of payout at which he was looking, advised him against it. He didn’t care. He had been hired to pitch, and he was going to pitch as hard as he could and as long as he had to, even for a team he was leaving at the end of the season.
You know what the dream is for every contending team looking for starting pitching at this trade deadline? The dream is for someone to come even close to doing for them what CC did for the Brewers that year.
“We jumped on his back and he carried us,” J.J. Hardy, a damn fine gamer for the Brewers at shortstop, once said.
Sabathia could have worn out what was such an amazing arm. He could have cost himself a ton of money. He pitched. You want to know who CC Sabathia was? That’s who.
Then he was with the Yankees, and was the horse they needed to get back on top as badly as the Brewers had needed him to get back to the postseason. He was 19-8 that year. He made 34 starts and pitched 230 innings and even with Derek Jeter still around and Mo Rivera still around, even with Alex Rodriguez in the house and Hideki Matsui on his way to being MVP of the ’09 World Series against the Phillies, Sabathia was as much the beating heart of the last Yankee team to win the World Series as anyone.
Then he made five more starts in the playoffs. Against the Angels in the American League Championship Series, he was 2-0 with a 1.13 earned run average. Everybody remembers how great A-Rod was with the pennant on the line. Sabathia was just as great and just as essential when he had the ball in his left hand.
Over the rest of his career with the Yankees, a full decade after that, he would pitch through injuries and pitch through hangovers as he battled alcoholism; if you want to learn about all that, read the searing account of his drinking problem — and how he finally decided to get sober one weekend in Baltimore — in a superb autobiography written by Chris Smith called “Till the End.”
So in the end, CC was even tougher than we knew.
Even when he was going mostly on toughness and memory and guile, he still had enough arm left that Joe Girardi gave him the ball in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS against the Astros and asked him to do as much as he could to pitch the Yankees back to the World Series. Sabathia only made it into the fourth inning that night before Girardi pulled him. He gave up five hits that night. But the one earned run he allowed was the only one the Astros got off him in his two starts in that series. His ERA for those two starts? 0.96. Even when CC Sabathia didn’t have much, he still had a lot.
He retired with a won-loss record across 19 seasons of 251-161 for the Indians, Brewers and Yankees. His lifetime ERA was 3.74. Whitey Ford, the greatest Yankee starting pitcher of them all, won 236 games in his own amazing career, all of them with the Yankees. CC wasn’t in pinstripes as long as Whitey, or Lefty Gomez, or Andy Pettitte, or Ron Guidry. He still goes in the conversation about the best pitchers the Yankees ever had.
Now he has made it to Cooperstown, N.Y. It has been a long road and sometimes a painful one, because it took him as long to get sober as it did even with the excellence he kept bringing to the mound.
Here is just one passage from “Till The End,” about the day he finally hit rock bottom, one worth mentioning on the weekend when he will feel as if he’s on top of the world:
“I was standing in a damp cinder block storage room under Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles, wearing my New York Yankees t-shirt and my gray uniform pants, at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, searching for another bottle of Hennessy. Ever since I got to the ballpark I had been going back and forth from the clubhouse to the storage room, pouring myself drinks. In a half-hour I was scheduled to throw a bullpen, my workout between starts. And I was so blasted I couldn’t walk straight. I had come back from three surgeries and fought through hundreds of hangovers; the one thing I could always do was throw when I was supposed to throw. But now the room was spinning. There was no way I could take the ball and throw it without embarrassing myself. Man, what am I doing?”
He got help. This was 2015. He had already done the best pitching he was ever going to do, was well on the road to Cooperstown. But this was a different kind of start for Sabathia, about something even more important: The road to recovery.
He was a Yankee who drank too much. They have had a lot of those, all the way back to Babe Ruth. Mickey Mantle got sober before he died. CC Sabathia finally got sober after that Sunday-morning-coming-down in Baltimore when Cooperstown must have felt like it was on the other side of the world.
Such a great baseball story for the big man, in so many ways. He always took the ball, in Cleveland and Milwaukee and at Yankee Stadium, until the day he couldn’t. Now, arriving at this weekend in Cooperstown so well earned, he has the life he was meant to have, and not just with a baseball in his hand.
MORE PANIC IN JETS LAND, CHASING AFTER SCOTTIE & AARON GLENN IS WORTH ROOTING FOR …
When Caitlin Clark injures her leg, an entire league starts to limp.
Who can ever forget the trade deadline when the Yankees saw Joey Gallo as being part of the solution?
You know the deal with Jets fans:
When they heard that Justin Fields had limped off the practice field the other day they immediately looked for a bed under which to hide.
And those were the calmer Jets fans.
By the way?
There are an awful lot of Yankee fans I know who have this reaction every time Aaron Boone puts another smiley face on another sloppy loss:
“You talkin’ to ME?”
Maybe Year 2 for Malik Nabers will get him to stop thinking he took the wrong plane to the NFL.
At this point, even people in outer space know that Mike Brown likes to play fast.
For the last time:
No one is saying that Scottie Scheffler is going to dominate professional golf for as long as Tiger did.
And no one would ever suggest that Scheffler is going to come close to Tiger’s 15 majors, even if Scheffler is still just 29 years old.
But what you are allowed to say, and think, is that Scheffler is better than everybody else — including Rory McIlroy — the way Tiger was at his best.
A great old golf character named Bob Drum, who came out of Pittsburgh covering Arnold Palmer, used to call the best golfer in the world “Bubba.”
Arnold was Bubba, then Jack Nicklaus was, and then Tom Watson was when he started to knock off Jack.
Then along came Tiger.
Scheffler is Bubba now.
And everybody is going to have to come get him.
If they can, that is.
Let’s see how the Giants like Rafael Devers’ contract in a couple of years.
Everybody knows by now about the ridiculous bat-flipping controversy involving a Little League kid named Marco Rocco over in Jersey.
Just put me down as being on Team Marco.
Happy “Happy Gilmore” Week.
Aaron Glenn isn’t going to do standup the way Rex Ryan did.
But he’s sure worth rooting for, right?
If you haven’t yet seen the movie “F1,” here is something you’ll discover when you do:
Brad Pitt is still a movie star.
Pro tip:
If you’re a media person actually calling a pimp like Ghislaine Maxwell a pimp, you’re the pimp.
James Patterson and Mike Lupica’s new Jane Smith thriller, “The Hamptons Lawyer,” is on-sale now.
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