Yankees Mag: From Vallejo to Valhalla

Throughout CC Sabathia’s life, there have been many different people who, in many different ways, have let him know how special he is. Not long after he first started playing organized baseball, his father, Carsten Charles -- who was known to all as Corky -- could see his son had the athleticism and physical attributes to go far, predicting that CC wouldn’t just make it to the big leagues someday, but that he’d pitch for the New York Yankees. His family and friends in Vallejo, Calif., starting with his mom, Margie, wrapped him in their love from Day 1, providing unconditional support and steering him away from the perils of inner-city life as best they could. Mentors such as his high school coach, Abe Hobbs, recognized early on the exceptional talent and person that Sabathia was, protecting his arm while arming him with the tools to succeed later in life.

Most recently, it was the Baseball Writers' Association of America, who elected Sabathia to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot, prompting a torrent of praise from all corners of the sport. “I am thrilled to see CC Sabathia receiving baseball’s ultimate individual honor, not only because of his elite performance on the mound, but for what he meant to his teammates and our fans,” said Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner. “Throughout his time in pinstripes, he embodied the best of what it means to be a Yankee.”

Sixteen years earlier, it was Yankees general manager Brian Cashman who was letting the big southpaw know how highly he thought of him, all but begging the free agent to come to New York. But despite Cashman’s overtures and his father’s premonition, Sabathia was not interested. He had heard rumblings about the decaying state of the Yankees at that time, and as if pitching in a tough, unfamiliar environment with huge expectations wasn’t enough pressure, Cashman wanted him to come in and repair a fractured clubhouse.

Thankfully, Sabathia’s wife, Amber, who had been by his side since they were in high school, had a vision of what their life in New York could be. If there was one person on the planet capable of doing what Cashman was asking, it was her husband. “Don’t sell yourself short,” she told him.

Sabathia decided to take a chance on the Yankees, who needed him desperately. All these years later, as the finishing touches are being put on a bronze plaque showing Sabathia with the famous interlocking NY on his cap, it can be said that he needed the Yankees, too.

“Had I been in a different organization,” Sabathia said, “I think it turns out a little differently.”

***

Sabathia’s agent wasn’t the only one freaking out. The 2008 regular season was coming to a close, and it felt like the left-hander was taking the hill for the Brewers every other night. At the Trade Deadline, Cleveland had sent Sabathia to a Milwaukee team intent on making the postseason, and the pitcher demanded that his manager let him do all the heavy lifting.

The 28-year-old had been at the top of Cashman’s wish list for more than a year. In 2007, the GM convinced Yankees ownership not to trade for Johan Santana, but instead to hold on to the young players they would have had to send to Minnesota and go after Sabathia in free agency a year later. But now, the Brewers were running him into the ground. His final four starts for the team all came on just three days’ rest.

Please! Cashman thought. You’re breaking my guy!

Sabathia was loving every minute of it. Ever since his North Vallejo Little League days, he embraced being that dude. Big game against South Vallejo? Give me the ball. Need me to beat the Cubs on short rest on the last day of the season to get into the playoffs? I got you.

Sabathia was smack dab in the middle of the best stretch of his career. He felt like he couldn’t lose. It started back in the Bay Area in August 2005, during a bullpen session in Oakland with Cleveland pitching coach Carl Willis. Sabathia was in his fifth big league season and had enjoyed some success: Seventeen wins and a runner-up finish in the 2001 American League Rookie of the Year voting; double-digit wins each of the next three seasons and back-to-back All-Star nods in 2003 and ’04.

But in ’05, he wasn’t getting outs as easily or as frequently as he would have liked. He had a losing record and an ERA north of 5.00 when he went to his trusted pitching guru and told him, “I need an out pitch.” Willis helped Sabathia develop an 83 mph slider that would bore in on righties, break away from lefties and take his career to the moon. He went from being 6-9 at the end of July to finishing the 2005 season 15-10. By 2007, he was the best pitcher in the league, capturing the AL Cy Young Award.

When the Brewers’ run ended in 2008 and Sabathia officially hit free agency, Cashman was the first to call. Over the next two months, he put on a full-court press, extolling the virtues of the New York area. If you want to live in the concrete jungle and have the craziness, there’s no better place than the city that never sleeps. If you’re a beach guy, you’ve got the great Jersey Shore, you’ve got Long Island beaches, you could live in Connecticut on the water if you wanted, Long Island Sound. If you’re a big farm guy, you can go get a country home in Greenwich, Connecticut, or somewhere nice in Westchester …

With their 5-year-old son, Carsten III, set to begin kindergarten the next fall and two (soon to be three) more young kids at home, the one thing CC and Amber knew is that, wherever he signed, the family would make it their year-round home. New Jersey’s top-ranked schools held plenty of appeal, but Sabathia still wasn’t sold. Why would he go from a team where each day was more fun than the last to one where there was palpable tension among the team’s biggest superstars? Where it was only fun if the Yankees were winning -- and they weren’t: The last game at Yankee Stadium was the first of Derek Jeter’s career in which his team had been mathematically eliminated from postseason contention.

“I’m like, ‘Dude, that’s why I’m talking to you!’” Cashman said recently. “The recruitment of CC was to help clean that up and bring us together because we were slowly tearing each other apart. So, that was the methodology: First and foremost, great player. Secondarily, he’s going to really be a ‘glue guy’ to bring into that environment.”

The GM signed Sabathia to what was, at that point, the largest contract ever awarded to a pitcher -- a reported $161 million for seven years. And just in case New York proved to be the wrong fit, Cashman put in an opt-out clause that would allow Sabathia to leave after three years. It took about three days in Tampa, Fla., for the Yankees’ new ace to know he wasn’t going anywhere. He arrived for his first Spring Training as a Yank still feeling a bit apprehensive, but after hanging with the team’s captain and getting to know some of his other championship-pedigree teammates, any fears quickly evaporated.

“Going into the offseason, I just heard all of the stuff that was going on, the turmoil in the Yankees’ clubhouse,” Sabathia said. “I came from a place in Cleveland and Milwaukee where [team chemistry] was the most important thing, and it just didn’t seem like it was that important there. But having a chance to talk to Cashman, and him explaining to me that that’s why he wanted me to come there, pretty quickly -- like, two or three days into Spring Training -- me and Andy [Pettitte] are running in the outfield; I get a chance to meet Jeter, we’re hanging out. The pitching staff is going to dinners, going to basketball games together. It didn’t take long at all before I felt like this was the right decision.”

***

After 86 years in The House That Ruth Built, the Yankees opened the doors to their new home on April 16, 2009, and the legion of folks who could see that there was something special about Sabathia soon grew to include the Yankees’ entire fan base. A sellout crowd filed into the pristine park early that Thursday afternoon, eager to witness history. Standing atop the mound in his new home, wearing pinstripes in a real game for the first time, with future Hall of Famers surrounding him and his former team, Cleveland, in the opposing dugout, a feeling came over Sabathia that he would later get inked on his body: 50,000 people in the Bronx, and the s--- don’t start until I’m ready.

He fired his first pitch into Jorge Posada’s mitt, and a less stodgy, more swaggy era of Yankees baseball was underway. With Sabathia setting the tone, the clubhouse got looser, the music louder, the road trips more fun. Veterans didn’t haze rookies; they took care of them. Guys were free to be themselves. Walk-off wins were celebrated with pies to the face on live TV. By midsummer, the entire team was doing fully clothed cannonballs in Alex Rodriguez’s swimming pool together -- an unthinkable scenario before Sabathia had come to town.

“He was such a great connector in the clubhouse, and he brought teams together,” said Joe Girardi, who managed Sabathia from 2009 to 2017. “Oftentimes, when a player is so good, we don’t talk about that stuff. How he carried himself in the clubhouse was just as important as what he did on the field. CC always had everyone’s back, and that’s what I loved about him.”

Behind Sabathia’s Major League-best 19 victories, the 2009 Yankees rolled to a division title and 103 wins, matching their highest total since 1998. They swept the Twins in the ALDS, then vanquished the Angels, with Sabathia earning ALCS MVP honors. And on Nov. 4, after Hideki Matsui drove in six runs in the Game 6 clincher, the ace smiled from ear to ear in the ebullient home clubhouse, his son perched atop the broad shoulders that had helped carry the Yankees to their first World Series championship in nine years -- and their most recent to date.

Sabathia’s No. 52 became a big seller at Yankee Stadium’s team stores and in the souvenir shops along River Avenue as he continued his run as one of the game’s most dominant pitchers. By going 21-7 in 2010, he achieved a goal that Jim “Mudcat” Grant -- a two-time All-Star during the 1960s -- had instilled in him during his Cleveland days, becoming the 15th “Black Ace” to win at least 20 games. In 2011, the 19-game winner reached the 230-inning mark and finished top five in Cy Young voting for a fifth straight season. In 2012, he struck out 197 batters -- the sixth year in a row he reached or surpassed that number -- and made his sixth AL All-Star team.

“He was somebody that we wanted to win for,” said fellow Class of 2025 inductee Ichiro Suzuki, who was traded to New York in July 2012. “He was such a professional out there and just went about his business the right way.”

But good times don’t last forever. Personal and professional adversity were headed Sabathia’s way, and, along with his family, the organization that he had helped elevate would be the foundation upon which his life and career would be rebuilt.

***

Hampered by knee problems and -- unbeknownst to anyone outside his inner circle -- struggling with a longtime alcohol addiction, Sabathia bottomed out in 2015. Too inebriated to throw a bullpen during the Yankees’ final regular-season trip to Baltimore, he realized in that moment that the time had come to seek help -- immediately. While his team prepared to face Houston in the AL Wild Card Game, Sabathia checked himself into a Connecticut rehab facility.

Dellin Betances was a 27-year-old All-Star reliever on that team who was looking forward to pitching in the postseason for the first time. But as one of the many players in that clubhouse who looked up to Sabathia, he was way more concerned about the health of his “big brother.”

“We were all there for him,” Betances said. “He had been there for all [of us]. You’re talking about a guy that would take the ball every five days regardless of the situation. He played through a lot of injuries, especially later in his career. So, for him to be vulnerable, to say, ‘I need the help,’ and step away in that matter, we knew that we had his back. No matter the situation, we just wanted him to be good and his family to be good, and we were all there for him.”

Sabathia got the professional help he needed, and he came back with a renewed outlook. Understanding that he was far from being that 21-year-old rookie flamethrower who could just “bulldog” his way through a lineup, Sabathia leaned on the lessons he had learned in the Yankees organization from great pitching minds such as Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Dave Eiland and Billy Connors, evolving into a crafty, unpredictable, soft-contact-inducing artisan on the mound. After posting a career-worst 5.28 mark in 2014, Sabathia lowered his ERA each of the next four seasons.

By the end of 2017, Sabathia had started more than 500 games in his career, plus another 22 in postseason play. A defeat at the hands of the Astros in the 2017 ALCS -- in which Sabathia was the losing pitcher in Game 7 -- left him feeling deflated and seriously thinking about retiring. But a call from an old friend got him thinking about something else, something he had never really considered: Cooperstown.

Broadcaster and former big leaguer Harold Reynolds brought it to Sabathia’s attention that he was within shouting distance of 250 wins and 3,000 strikeouts -- numbers that would all but guarantee Hall of Fame election. He thought about what that would mean, not just to him and his family, but to the game that he cares so deeply about.

Like a prism, Sabathia had always taken the light that people poured into him and refracted it outward brilliantly, giving back to the sport and the communities that had supported him in magnificent ways. Through their PitCCh In Foundation, he and Amber enriched the lives of countless children across the country. His work with the Players Alliance continues to have an immeasurable impact on the health and growth of the game. Becoming a Hall of Famer could amplify all those efforts.

To walk through the Hall of Fame’s plaque gallery and study the names and faces that have been immortalized is to get a crash course in the history of baseball, and to be reminded of its segregated past. Although Black players have gained a strong foothold in Cooperstown ever since Jackie Robinson became the first to be enshrined in 1962, most of them have been hitters. The only U.S.-born Black starting pitcher elected for his accomplishments in the AL or NL is Bob Gibson, who threw his last pitch five years before Sabathia was born.

With that goal in mind, Sabathia came back for 2018 and made 29 starts, posting a 3.65 ERA. He showed young players such as future Yankees captain Aaron Judge what leadership looks like. He eased the transition from the broadcast booth to the skipper’s office for first-year manager Aaron Boone, his former teammate in Cleveland. And if anyone thought the 38-year-old’s competitive fire had waned, they were reminded that if you mess with one of Sabathia’s teammates, you had better watch out.

In his final start of the season at Tampa Bay, Sabathia needed to pitch seven frames to reach 155 for the year and earn a $500,000 bonus. He had an 11-0 lead and had allowed just one hit through five frames, yet he was steaming mad. The Rays came dangerously close to drilling his catcher, Austin Romine, in the head with a pitch, and Sabathia wasn’t having it. He told teammates he was going to retaliate against the first batter he faced in the bottom of the sixth, so be ready to fight.

“Don’t do it,” Brett Gardner pleaded with him, knowing all that was at stake.

True to his word, Sabathia plunked Jesús Sucre in the thigh, earning an immediate trip to the showers, but not before pointing at Rays manager Kevin Cash and shouting, “That’s for you,” followed by something unprintable.

The Yankees reportedly paid him the bonus anyway.

“CC was an incredible competitor, teammate and leader who embodied the heart and soul of our team and this city,” Judge said, adding that he was “the ultimate glue that held us together.”

After an offseason health scare with his heart, Sabathia announced that the 2019 season would be his last, and he intended to make the most of it. On April 30 in Arizona, he struck out John Ryan Murphy for career strikeout No. 3,000. On June 19 at Yankee Stadium, he beat the Rays for career win No. 250. In September, the Yankees held a celebration in the Bronx that left the big-hearted southpaw in tears. His left arm, the one that had taken him from the notorious Crest neighborhood in Vallejo to the highest reaches of the national pastime, was on the verge of blowing out, and in Game 4 of the 2019 ALCS against Houston, after pitching more than 3,700 regular-season and postseason innings in his career, it finally did. He walked off the mound at Yankee Stadium for the last time with his face buried in his glove as every man, woman and child in the building -- including the Astros -- gave him a standing ovation.

“It was kind of a solemn moment, really, for our team,” said Gerrit Cole, who would sign with the Yankees two months later. Despite the fierce rivalry between the Yankees and Astros, Cole wasn’t alone in standing misty-eyed and clapping at the top step of the visitors’ dugout. “In the heat of the battle, it was just having an appreciation for the warrior that he was. And to a certain extent, he kind of did go out on his own terms. He wanted to go out there and give it everything he had until he didn’t have any more. He certainly did that. Admirable.”

***

Sabathia tried to fight it for a long time, maintaining that he was a sports fan, but he can’t deny it: He’s a baseball guy. In fact, the Sabathias are a baseball family. Their two sons play. Amber is now an agent with CAA. CC is a guest instructor at Yankees Spring Training, and he serves as a special assistant to Commissioner Rob Manfred.

“The game has meant everything to me,” Sabathia said. “I love baseball. I love being around the guys. I love being in the [Commissioner’s] Office, spending time with Rob, Pat [Courtney], Noah [Garden], all these different guys, and seeing the different aspects of the game. It makes me not miss it. Being able to have my hand in these different [special events], being able to go to Rickwood, being able to go to All-Star Games and being able to stay so close to the game, I get my fill of baseball, so I’m grateful for that.”

In the days and weeks leading up to the Jan. 21 announcement, Sabathia checked Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame ballot tracker fervently, refreshing his browser multiple times a day to see where he stood. He was at his home in New Jersey, surrounded by family and friends, when the call came in to Amber’s phone letting him know that it was official: He was a Hall of Famer.

Not even Corky predicted that one.

“It was a lot of emotions, just thinking about my journey, thinking about my family, my wife, my dad, my mom -- all the different people that played a huge role in me getting to where we are today,” he said. “Just a wave of emotions -- thankful, blessed and super happy.”

The smile was still plastered on Sabathia’s face two days later, when he arrived in Cooperstown with Ichiro and Billy Wagner for a formal press conference announcing their election and to take a private tour of the museum. An A’s fan growing up, he beamed like a kid at the Bash Brothers memorabilia on display and gushed over the green-and-gold Dave Stewart jersey. “Stew was my guy,” Sabathia said. He recalled riding his bike to his best friend Dave Bernstine’s house to watch the 1989 World Series when the 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake suddenly sent the cars parked along the street bouncing up and down. He looked on with pride at the “Souls of the Game” exhibit, where, in a Candlestick Park locker that had been used by Willie Mays and Barry Bonds, the jersey he wore when he recorded his 3,001st strikeout was displayed alongside other historic items, such as the bat from Judge’s 61st home run in 2022 and the batting gloves Rickey Henderson wore when he swiped his record 939th base. Taken downstairs into the basement archives, where senior curator Tom Shieber had laid out several rare items not currently on display, Sabathia marveled as he held the glove that Vida Blue wore when he no-hit the Twins in 1970.

“That was my dad’s favorite player.”

A huge crowd will be headed to upstate New York this summer to see Sabathia officially take his rightful place among the game’s all-time greats at the induction ceremony on July 27. Not just fans from both coasts and everywhere in between, but so many of the coaches and teammates whose lives were touched by No. 52 will be there, too. “It’ll be my first time going to Cooperstown,” said Betances. “It definitely means a lot.”

Just like the Yankees found out in 2009, the Hall of Famers in attendance will soon learn (if they don’t already know) that this is one special human joining them, someone who is going to make their fraternity even greater. And from now on, when some Little League pitcher from the Bay Area or the Bronx or any other urban metropolis across America visits the National Baseball Hall of Fame and goes searching for a plaque of someone they can identify with, they can look for the Class of 2025 and check out the dude from Vallejo with the interlocking NY on his cap.

“I’m just thankful to [Cashman] that he was really persuasive,” Sabathia said. “And I’m super excited that I had a chance to play 11 years in the Bronx with that uniform on and excited to have that hat on my plaque, for sure.”

Nathan Maciborski is the executive editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the 2025 Yankees Yearbook. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.