CC Sabathia will be remembered as a Hall of Famer — and a great teammate: ‘He always put team over self’

Hall of Famer CC Sabathia. That’s how he would like you to refer to him now. Tuesday night, Sabathia was announced as baseball’s newest Hall of Famer, joining Ichiro Suzuki and Billy Wagner in the 2025 class. Dick Allen and Dave Parker will also be part of this summer’s induction class after being voted in by the Classic Baseball Era committee in December.

Sabathia received my Hall of Fame vote, and his career was indeed Cooperstown worthy. He’s third all-time in strikeouts among lefties, he won 251 games, he was the ace of a World Series winner, and he won a Cy Young. In this era of shrinking pitcher workloads, Sabathia will go down as one of the game’s last true workhorses. He averaged — averaged — 216.3 innings a year for a 12-year period from 2002-13.

Above all though, Sabathia wanted to be remembered as a good teammate, and someone they could count on.

“To win, to take the ball every single time out, to be that good teammate and be there for the guys. That’s all I ever wanted,” Sabathia told the Bergen Record prior to the Hall of Fame announcement.

In one of the most selfless acts in recent baseball history, Sabathia made his final three starts on three days’ rest to help the Milwaukee Brewers reach the postseason in 2008. He was about to become a free agent and sign a record contract, and was playing for a team he’d joined at the trade deadline only two months prior, yet Sabathia was determined to get the Brewers to the postseason for the first time in a quarter-century.

“I went into (manager Dale Sveum’s) office and told him I was pitching,” Sabathia told MLB.com years later. “The Brewers shouldn’t take any blame (if I got hurt). It was all on me.”

Sabathia allowed two earned runs in 21 2/3 innings in those three starts, including a four-hit complete game in Game 162 to clinch the postseason berth. He made four starts in 13 days. Again, this was for a team with which he had no long-term ties, and with a massive free agent payday on the horizon. He put himself as risk to help Milwaukee end their postseason drought. Sabathia made an indelible mark on Brewers fans despite being there for less than half a season.

“He was such a great connector in the clubhouse, and he brought teams together,” Joe Girardi, later Sabathia’s manager with the New York Yankees, said in a statement following the Hall of Fame announcement. “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.”

Late in his career, Sabathia forfeited a $500,000 bonus when he got ejected for hitting Tampa Bay Rays catcher Jesús Sucre in retaliation for catching Austin Romine having a pitch buzz behind his head in the previous half-inning. It was Sabathia’s final start of the season and he needed to throw seven innings to reach the bonus, but was ejected in the sixth inning with a 7-0 lead and after throwing only 55 pitches. The bonus was well within reach. Instead, he stood up for his teammate.

As he left the field following the ejection, Sabathia pointed at the Rays’ dugout and said, “That’s for you, bitch.”

“He’s the same guy to every guy. He has a tremendous amount of respect from everybody in here. He’s a good human being. He’s a hell of a baseball player, who’s had a hell of a career,” Romine told ESPN after the game. “There’s just something about some people, the way they carry themselves. The way they act. The way they treat people. I don’t know too many better people.”

Sabathia accomplished just about everything a pitcher could hope to accomplish in this game. He won 20 games in a season, 251 games in his career, he’s in the 3,000-strikeout club, he won a World Series and a Cy Young, he signed a record contract, and now he’s in the Hall of Fame. Ask him though, and Sabathia will tell you he wanted to be known as a good teammate. He did that and then some, whether it was in Cleveland, Milwaukee, or New York.

“He is a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer because of his exceptional body of work on the bump — but for me, his greater legacy is the type of teammate he was,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said in a statement. “He always put team over self. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone he played with who didn’t consider him one of the best teammates and fiercest competitors they ever shared a clubhouse with.”