New York Yankees catcher Austin Romine was buckling his shinguards in the dugout when he heard a booming voice and immediately looked up.
It was CC Sabathia. He was pissed.
“First dude,” Sabathia said.
It was Sept. 27, 2018. Sabathia was set on revenge against the Tampa Bay Rays, after reliever Andrew Kittredge aimed a 93-mph fastball at Romine’s head and narrowly missed in the top of the sixth inning with the New York Yankees ahead, 7-0, at Tropicana Field.
He decided he was going to hit catcher Jesús Sucre to lead off the bottom of the inning to send a message. He was going to do it even it meant getting ejected and finishing the season just short of a contract incentive that would have netted him $500,000.
Aware of the pending payday, Romine briefly tried talking Sabathia out of it. He knew Sabathia started the game needing to throw seven innings for the bonus, and the lefty was two innings shy.
“Nope,” Sabathia said, walking away. “First dude.”
On Tuesday, the Baseball Hall of Fame will announce whether Sabathia has earned first-ballot enshrinement.
When voters from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America contemplated Sabathia’s resume, they weighed all the stats and accolades. They considered that he was the ace when the Yankees won the World Series in 2009, a feat the team hasn’t accomplished since. They noted his 2007 American League Cy Young Award with the Cleveland Guardians, plus his 3,093 strikeouts, 251 wins and six All-Star appearances over his 19-year career. And some likely were still awed that Sabathia saved the Milwaukee Brewers’ 2008 playoff run by making each of his final three starts of the season on three days rest.
What the voters couldn’t quantify, however, was the outsized impact he had on his teammates and the respect he garnered throughout the game.
Never was that more on display on a public stage than in Sabathia’s last start of 2018.
After Sabathia forfeited the half-a-million dollar bonus by plunking Sucre on the butt and getting thrown out, he pointed to Kittredge in the Rays’ dugout and TV cameras could read his lips:
“That’s for you, bitch.”
At the time, it seemed like a shocking move. He had thrown just 54 pitches over five innings, and he was cruising, dotting his signature slider on both sides of the plate and handcuffing righties with the cut fastball that resurrected him late in his career. He wasn’t going to get another chance in the regular season to reach the incentive.
But to Romine and to manager Aaron Boone, it wasn’t a surprise.
All game, the Rays had chirped from their dugout at Sabathia for pitching inside and then hitting Jake Bauers on the hand.
When Romine collapsed to the dirt to avoid Kittredge’s fastball, he had a simple question to the catcher Sucre: “Why?”
For Sabathia, there was no question what had to happen next. He had to protect his teammates, even if home plate umpire Vic Carapazza already had issued warnings to both dugouts.
As Romine dusted himself off, Sabathia left the Yankees’ dugout to shout at the Rays. Boone held him back, walking him to the dugout.
In the process, Boone asked Sabathia not to retaliate. He knew it was a futile request.
“I remember being like, ‘Yeah, let’s not have him throw at anyone here,’ and knowing in my head that I don’t think he’s listening to me in this spot,” Boone said.
The fastball Sabathia hit Sucre with was 92.5 mph — the fastest pitch he threw all night.
“It speaks volumes to the old school baseball player he was, and the kind of baseball player he came up with,” Romine said. “No one is throwing at your guys, especially at the head. I think that really set something off in him. I’m never going to say it was about me. It was about his team. It was about his catcher and about his team being thrown at, and he’s been the guy to protect his team throughout his career. You’re throwing at the nine-hole backup catcher, and that’s one thing. You’re not going to throw at the three-hole, four-hole hitters.”
“That’s the type of guy you want to go to battle with,” Aaron Judge said at the time.
“I don’t really make decisions based on money, I guess,” Sabathia said after the 12-1 win. “I just felt like it was the right thing to do.”
Romine played parts of eight seasons as Sabathia’s teammate. He said Sabathia was a de facto captain in the Yankees’ clubhouse, and that the respect Sabathia received from his opponents was unlike anything he’d ever seen.
“He’s still the only guy ever where, generally, leadoff hitters come over and they tip their hat to the opposing manager,” Romine said. “Well, they would do that, and CC would be sitting on that water cooler, and the leadoff hitter would tip their hat to CC. It was funny to watch.”
“He’s getting ready to go to the Hall of Fame because of his excellence on the mound and the numbers he put up and the things he did,” Boone said. “But I think you’d be hard pressed to find somebody that he ever played with that probably didn’t have him near the top of their all-time teammate list. He’s such a connector. Easy to relate to. Easy to talk to. Made you feel important. Lived for the team over his own personal stuff.
“The great ones that are like that, and Judgey is like that a little bit too. I feel like there’s an underlying confidence that they know that they are going to get theirs and do well. So they don’t really even care about it. It’s about winning and the team, and they live it. CC lived it over and over again.”
At the end of the season, the Yankees gave Sabathia the bonus even though the ejection meant he came up just short.
“Grand scheme of things,” Boone said, “and the career he had, the $500,000 — it didn’t matter to him. Just didn’t matter. His first thing was being a teammate — being a great teammate. The competitive part of things.
“In the end, it just added to the legend of CC.”
(Top photo of Sabathia after his ejection against the Rays in September 2018: Mark LoMoglio/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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