CLEVELAND — No reasonable person would deny that CC Sabathia‘s legacy is forever dressed in pinstripes. He won a World Series and most of his games with the New York Yankees, the team now represented on his Hall of Fame plaque.
But Sabathia’s Cooperstown career began in Cleveland, and he’s never not celebrated that link. Cleveland’s where he became a man — got married, bought his first home, had three of his four kids and learned how to be a frontline starter.
The team then known as the Indians drafted Sabathia with the 20th overall pick in the 1998 MLB Draft. It was a big bet that the kid who had not quite yet turned 18 could learn how to properly utilize the power of his pitches.
To saw Sabathia was raw is an understatement.
“In my very first bullpen after I got drafted, we’re in Bluefield, Va., and [pitching coach] Carl [Willis] goes, ‘All right, let me see your four-seamer, two-seamer, curveball, whatever you got,’” Sabathia recalled with a smile on the night he was elected to the Hall. “I was like, ‘What do you mean, four-seamer? Like, I grab the ball right here in the middle and I throw it like this. When I want to throw a slider, I drop down here.’ He was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got a lot of work to do.’”
Willis, who has spent the majority of his long and distinguished coaching career with Cleveland and is currently the club’s big-league pitching coach, had a profound influence on Sabathia’s career, teaching him the distinction between two- and four-seamers, how to be efficient, how to sequence his pitches, etc. And after Sabathia had debuted in MLB at 20 years young and grown into an All-Star arm, Willis, in 2006, helped him reach the next level by discovering a slider that, from that point forward, became one of the plus-plus pitches that defined his career.
Sabathia won the American League Cy Young Award with the Indians the next year.
“Literally everything that I learned as a pitcher, mentality-wise, delivery-wise, even down to holding the baseball,” Sabathia said, “Carl Willis was responsible for.”
Beyond his relationship with Willis, Sabathia made his first professional baseball friends in Cleveland. He always counted David Riske as the closest of those pals.
If Sabathia had one regret about his time with the Indians, it was what happened after that Cy Young-winning regular season in 2007. Cleveland reached the doorstep of the World Series with a 3-1 lead on the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series. But Sabathia got outdueled by Josh Beckett in Game 5 at Progressive Field and the Indians began to lose their grip on the series.
“I feel like if I pitched better in 2007,” he said, “we win the World Series and we’re still not looking [to end] that drought [dating back to 1948].”
When it was clear the drought would continue in a lost first half in 2008, the Indians made the painful but unavoidable decision to trade Sabathia to the Brewers in early July. Discussions about a possible contract extension had gone nowhere, as Sabathia, well within his right, was out to break the mold in pitching pacts. After routinely pitching on short rest and putting the Brewers on his back all the way to October in the remainder of 2008, he found that pact with the Yankees club whose logo will now forever don his bronzed cap.
Sabathia finished his Indians career with 106 of his eventual 251 wins (ranking 13th in franchise history) and 1,265 of his 3,093 strikeouts (ranking seventh). That the Sabathia trade netted Cleveland a popular and highly productive player in Michael Brantley only adds to the impact Sabathia had on this franchise.
And the impact runs both ways, as Sabathia has always been quick to acknowledge. He still visits Northeast Ohio every year in connection with the PitCCh In Foundation he established in 2008 and a baseball field at Luke Easter Park now bears his name.
“It makes it super special,” Sabathia said, “to still have these connections to the city.”
That connection will endure, independent of what’s on Sabathia’s plaque.
