CC Sabathia adds another C to his name now, for Cooperstown, now that he becomes the latest great Yankee to become a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He also proudly joins a list of the best left-handed starters the Yankees have ever had, in there with Whitey Ford, the best of them all, and Ron Guidry and Andy Pettitte, all the way back to Lefty Gomez. But mostly CC Sabathia goes in there as what he always was in baseball, even before he arrived at Yankee Stadium. He goes in as an ace.
And he was not just any ace. He was the one the Yankees needed the last time they won a World Series, back in 2009, when he put another pitching staff on his back, this time in New York. In a baseball life of so many big games, even when he didn’t have the arm anymore, he just wanted the ball. Short rest or not, just because he was always long on heart.
He always reminded you of the story about Guidry, before the Bucky Dent playoff game against the Red Sox in 1978. The Yankees had been beaten on Sunday by Cleveland and now manager Bob Lemon needed a starter for the next day at Fenway Park. Guidry was of course magnificent that year, 25-3. But he hadn’t made a single start on short rest. Lemon was alone in the Yankee dugout, an hour or so after the loss to the Indians, considering his options, when Guidry went and found him.
“I’ll take the ball,” he said, and sure did on one of the most famous October afternoons the Yankees have ever had.
That was CC Sabathia, in Cleveland and briefly in Milwaukee and then in New York. Give him the ball. Even near the end, in 2017, with his fastball gone and his knees shot, a couple of years after he had made the decision to go to rehab and get sober — after all of the miles he had on him, both on and off the field — Joe Girardi still gave him the ball against the Astros in Game 7 of the ALCS. He was 37. It was eight years after he’d been MVP of the ALCS against the Angels, on his way to the Canyon of Heroes. But he still had enough arm left to go 14-5 that year. And was out there for one more big game.
“You never take these opportunities for granted,” Sabathia said before that Game 7 start, and he never did, whether it was Game 1 in October or Game 7.
There was a shining Game 5 against the Orioles one time, back in 2012. Buck Showalter was managing the Orioles then, and it was Showalter who’d always said, “You know an ace when you see one.” CC Sabathia was all of that at Yankee Stadium that night, pitching a complete game and giving the Orioles just four hits and a run.
In the end, he pitched nearly 20 years in the big leagues, won 251 games against 161 losses, career earned run average of 3.74. Maybe he can’t remember how many of those games he pitched hungover, after another long night of drinking brandy, or whatever else was handy. But he kept showing up, and kept winning, so often with dazzling stuff, until the best of it for him, after he signed his big free agent contract with the Yankees and came to New York.
But finally there came the Sunday morning in Baltimore when he showed up drunk at the ballpark and couldn’t take the ball, and walked away from the Yankees and the last game of the regular season, on his way back home, then into rehab.
This is how he described his alcoholism in the fine and honest book about his life, “Till The End,” written with Chris Smith:
“I was a disciplined drunk for 15 years, so good at timing my benders that I’d won a Cy Young award and a championship ring and been paid $260 million. My career numbers looked as if they might eventually give me a shot at being elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame. And maybe what meant the most of all to me was that my teammates — in Cleveland, in Milwaukee, in New York — regularly said that they loved having me on their side and looked to me as a leader in the clubhouse.”
It is who he was, and what he was, across nearly two decades. He was an ace in Cleveland, and got traded to the Brewers, and even on the verge of free agency, he kept pitching on short rest with the Brewers, finally pitching them into the postseason. Then it was on to the Yankees, and being as much of a horse here was anywhere else, 230 innings his first season as a Yankee, 237.2 after that and 237.1 after that. He had one of those arms until he didn’t. But still kept winning, still won those 14 games in ’17 after getting sober.
I asked Chris Smith the other day if CC ever spoke much about the Hall of Fame when they were doing their book.
“He talked more about why Pettitte and Andruw Jones deserve to get in more than himself,” Smith said. “Classic CC.”
Classic CC Sabathia, on his way to Cooperstown now. It is where great Yankees are supposed to end up. He was one.