How CC Sabathia's 2008 Milwaukee summer smoothed a path to Cooperstown

New York Times

07-07-2025

It was the sweetest kind of summer fling, the kind you wish could last forever while knowing it never will. CC Sabathia and the Milwaukee Brewers were never going to stay together. But for 90 days in the heart of a Hall of Fame career, the man, the moment, the market and the mix made baseball magic.
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'He basically said, 'Guys, get on my back, let's go for a fun ride,'' said Doug Melvin, who traded for Sabathia 17 years ago Monday. 'And that's what happened.'
Melvin will represent the Brewers in Cooperstown, N.Y., this month for Sabathia's induction to the ranks of the immortals. He will fly from his summer home in Utah to Detroit to Syracuse, N.Y., then rent a car and drive to the charming, timeless village on Otsego Lake.
Nobody gets to Cooperstown easily. That is what makes it so special. Sabathia might have gotten there without the 11 victories and 128 strikeouts he collected as a Brewer. But he wouldn't have had nearly as much fun.
'I felt like I left a big impression on Milwaukee,' Sabathia said in January, after the writers elected him on the first ballot. 'But Milwaukee has left a huge impression on me.'
For Sabathia, 2008 sits between his Cy Young season with Cleveland and his championship with the Yankees. He won no awards that year and lost in the first round of playoffs. But he earned incalculable karma from the baseball gods.
Fueled by a fierce and instant bond with his new clubhouse, which included more Black teammates than he'd had since childhood in Vallejo, Calif., Sabathia assumed a bigger workload than any pitcher has undertaken since.
He won his first start, the day after the trade. He fired complete games in five of his next 10 starts through the end of August. Then, in late September, on the precipice of free agency, Sabathia made his final three starts on three days' rest. He completed the final one, in Game 162, and the Brewers reached the playoffs for the first time in 26 years.
For the 2008 season, Sabathia faced a staggering 1,023 batters. No pitcher has faced that many since, and the way the sport has evolved, nobody ever will.
'Anytime you bring CC up – although he is going to the Hall of Fame as a Yankee and he's had a bunch of accolades pre- and post-Milwaukee – there's not one negative thing about that name,' said Rickie Weeks, the Brewers' second baseman then and now their associate manager.
'I think the fans understood: this is not real, this is not something that's common for somebody to come in on a contract year and put his arm on the line for an organization that he barely knows to go out and win a game. That's the best compliment anybody can have as a player, if you ask me.'
The Brewers were in their fourth year under owner Mark Attanasio, who was eager to reframe the franchise's reputation. The playoff format offered only one wild card in each league, and the Brewers were tied for it, with St. Louis, on July 7. Melvin was willing to pay more to act early, believing – correctly – that extra starts by Sabathia could make the difference.
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He knew Cleveland had hoped to draft first baseman Matt LaPorta the year before, but Milwaukee got him instead. Including LaPorta in the deal got the Indians' attention, and Melvin also offered pitchers Zach Jackson and Rob Bryson. The final piece would be a player to be named – Class-A infielder Taylor Green or future All-Star outfielder Michael Brantley, then in Class AA.
'How about if we do this?' Melvin said, recalling what he told Indians general manager Mark Shapiro. 'If CC comes over and we get to the playoffs for the first time in (26) years, then you get to pick if it's Green or if it's Brantley. And if something happens, if CC gets hurt or it just doesn't really help us that much, then I get to pick the fourth player.'
That unusual – and unofficial – arrangement finalized the deal. Melvin told Sabathia he could take his time and be ready for a start in six days. Instead, Sabathia reported immediately and started the next day; his red Cleveland spikes had to be painted Brewers' blue.
Sabathia would make 10 starts at the stadium then called Miller Park, and eight of them drew more than 41,000 fans. Sabathia was pitching for the city, to be sure, but more deeply for his new teammates. He knew reliever David Riske, a close friend from their days in Cleveland. That helped. So did the makeup of the roster.
'When I walked into the Milwaukee clubhouse for the first time, I looked around and couldn't believe what I saw: five Black faces,' Sabathia wrote in 'Till The End,' his 2021 memoir with Chris Smith. 'That may not sound like a big number, but on a major-league roster, it was huge.'
Sabathia wrote that he had, at times, been the only Black player with Cleveland. And while he had plenty of Latino and White friends, like Riske, he did not realize how lonely he had been until arriving in Milwaukee.
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'To be Black in America is to constantly be on guard,' Sabathia wrote. 'With the Brewers, for the first time in my baseball life, I could be more at ease.'
The other Black players on the Brewers were Weeks, infielder Bill Hall, first baseman Prince Fielder and outfielders Mike Cameron and Tony Gwynn Jr. Another, Ray Durham, soon arrived in a trade.
'We're all still really close,' Sabathia said last spring, at a Hall of Fame event with Fielder and Gwynn. 'And I only played there for three months.'
It was like a clubhouse from the 1980s, when Black players made up more than 18 percent of MLB rosters. That figure has since been cut by two-thirds; according to MLB, only 6.2 percent of players on 2025 opening day rosters were Black. It's a multilayered issue that baseball has struggled to solve.
'I got a chance to play in an era where I saw three or four Black guys on a team, and when you came to their city, they took care of you,' said Cameron, who reached the majors in 1995, when Sabathia was still in high school. 'That was part of it, kind of like the Latin guys now, they bring food, they have a chance to understand (each other). I like that.'
Cameron, like Sabathia, was a clubhouse unifier with a wide, diverse circle of friends. But the composition of the Brewers clubhouse offered something intangible and resonant that made a newcomer at home.
'When you're joking, jawing, carrying on and everything, it's something we never really get a chance to express unless you're around your family at Thanksgiving or Christmas,' Cameron said. 'So when you have that type of energy going on, when you have two or three guys that legitimately understand what you've been through, it made it so good.'
As Sabathia described it, Cameron was the wise older brother; Weeks was quiet and shy but cutting with a well-timed jab; Fielder the loud trash talker; Hall the 'down-home dude' from Mississippi; Gwynn the consummate professional.
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'It was great because we weren't afraid of confrontation,' Weeks said. 'And confrontation doesn't mean fighting. We weren't afraid to call somebody out. Guys posted, and what I mean by posted is guys showed up to play. There was no 'I'm trying to save myself.''
As the pennant race reached its frenzied finish, another starter facing free agency, All-Star Ben Sheets, tried to pitch through elbow pain and tore a ligament. Even with that sobering example – and against the advice of his agent, Brian Peters – Sabathia began taking the ball on short rest. His teammates were awed by that selflessness.
'I look back on it and it just really speaks to his greatness, right?' Gwynn said. 'I mean, the mere fact that he was going out there every third day – and not just going out there but dominating – it was one of the craziest things I've ever been a part of. And he didn't blink. When he was asked, it was like a no-brainer.
'I imagine that would never happen again. Guys are way too business-conscious to pull that off going into free agency. That's nuts.'
After Sabathia completed the final game of the regular season – and the Florida Marlins helpfully eliminated the Mets in New York – the Brewers had finally returned to the postseason. It ushered in a new era for the franchise, which reached 3 million fans for the first time in 2008, then did it again in 2009 and 2011, four years before Melvin transitioned to an advisory role.
'They've done well since,' Melvin said of the Brewers, who have reached the postseason in six of the last seven years. 'But I'd like to think that 2008 sort of jump-started the change of how the franchise looked at things.'
Alas, in the fall of 2008 – well, it turned colder, that's where it ends. Sabathia started the second game of the division series in Philadelphia, again on three days' rest, and couldn't get out of the fourth inning. He walked the opposing pitcher, Brett Myers and gave up a grand slam to Shane Victorino. The Brewers lost in four games.
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'We pushed him so much that he had nothing left for the Phillies,' Cameron said. 'He battled, but he didn't have that same sharpness, that same late-inning grit. And that's our fault. He shouldn't have been put in that situation. And we didn't do much as an offense, either. We didn't give him the proper sendoff.'
The Yankees signed Sabathia, of course, attracted by his outsized talent and leadership qualities. Melvin got a courtesy meeting with Sabathia's agents at the winter meetings, but the sides didn't even talk money. The final deal with the Yankees – seven years, $161 million – was a record for a pitcher.
And Sabathia, having fit so seamlessly into a new setting in Milwaukee, did the same with the Yankees. As soon as he arrived, he was all in.
'To see him get there and see how he embraced it, and how they embraced him, that's one of the superpowers he has,' Gwynn said. 'He's just naturally a good dude. By that time he had been seasoned by the vets that he had come up with in Cleveland, and it was like he was blooming at the exact time for him to go out on his own. The timing couldn't have been any better.'
Neither could the setting for Sabathia's last preview before Broadway, on his way to Cooperstown.
(Photo of CC Sabathia's first start with the Brewers in 2008: Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)