The New York Yankees agreed to a one year deal with 38-year-old lefty CC Sabathia.
The deal is reportedly worth $8 million for his final season and will contain no incentives. It sounds like CC learned his lesson with incentives after the “that’s for you, bitch!” game.
The big fella was adamant about wanting to return to the Yanks, where he is among the longest-tenured players with Brett Gardner. He is one of the biggest leaders in any clubhouse in baseball, and he has my unconditional love forever.
As many as three non-Yankees teams reportedly reached out to Sabathia. Ken Rosenthal reported that one of them was the Houston Astros, who are in the market for starting pitchers since Dallas Keuchel and Charlie Morton are in free agency and they lose Lance McCullers Jr. to Tommy John surgery. I would have hated if CC had gone there!
Brian Cashman indicated mutual interest in a return in the last few days. It always seemed like a matter of when and not if, to me.
CC has gotten better and better in the late stage of his career. I hope he keeps going in this final season in 2019. From 2016-18 he has thrown about 150-160 innings (179.2 in 2016, roughly 150 in 2017-18, each) of sub-4.00 ERA baseball. As our fifth starter, sign me up for that!
He is four wins away from 250 wins (250 is kind of the new 300-wins, no?) and 14 strikeouts away from 3000 career strikeouts. He’s started thinking about those milestones and the Hall of Fame more in the last year or two, he admitted on R2C2. He’ll be in the Hall of Fame before too long, I’m sure. He’s a legend.
The Yankees are not done. Cashman knows he needs to get multiple starters this offseason. I think they will bring in two more, and I’d be pretty shocked if at least one of them is not JA Happ or Patrick Corbin. Otherwise, maybe they pulled off a trade for one of the Cleveland guys (Kluber and Carrasco).
Not sure how anyone would have a problem with bringing CC back, but I’ve already gotten a couple of tweets about it, so feel free to let me know if I’m dumb for being happy.