CC Sabathia - Till the End

Im a weird alcoholic. I dont fit the stereotypes. There was no single trigger that would set me off on a binge. Not a sad anniversary, not a time of the day, not going to a party. It was all of those things, and none of them. I didnt ever drink more if I pitched bad; I would drink just as much if I pitched good. There was always a reason to drink. I just really liked to drink, and drink, and drink, many times until I blacked out. For a long time it was mostly funlike when I got my first major league win and five of my Cleveland Indians teammates took me out to a Baltimore bar and stuffed every pocket of my suit with cash. The next morning I woke up wearing $10,000 in crumpled bills, as if I was the worlds largest fully clothed stripper. And there was never any trouble finding guys to go drinking with. Theres a lot of alcoholics in baseball. A lot. Many of them great players.

But heres the truly weird part: I could turn it on and off. For three days I would get absolutely rippedstarting fights, pissing in the bed, that kind of ripped. And then I wouldnt touch a drop for two days leading up to my next start. Say I pitched on Monday. That night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, I was hammered. Thursday, Fridaydetox, nothing but water and Gatorade. Saturday, when I came out of the game, I needed a Crown and Sprite at my locker. From the last pitch I threw, the cycle started all over again.

I was a disciplined drunk for fifteen years, so good at timing my benders that Id won a Cy Young Award and a world championship and been paid more than $260 million. My career numbers looked as if they might someday give me a shot at being elected to baseballs Hall of Fame. And maybe what meant the most of all to me was that my teammatesin Cleveland, in Milwaukee, in New Yorkregularly said that they loved having me on their side and looked to me as a leader in the clubhouse.

It was as if my arm wasnt connected to the rest of my body. No, not just to the rest of my bodyto the rest of my life. My mind, my bloodstream, probably my liver, they were addled by alcohol. My left arm, the one that carried me from the streets of Vallejo, California, to the mound at Yankee Stadium, that helped me hoist a World Series trophy, that built a secure life for my wife and our four kidsthat arm somehow stayed untainted. Yeah, over the years it required ice and heat and surgeons and rehab, but those were tune-ups. My arm endured. It lifted me from being broke to being rich and famous; it lifted three teams to greatness. My baseball head got wiser, and it made my arm clever and adaptable, but that was my baseball head. As my arm got treated and pampered so it could continue being an asset to billion-dollar corporations and to my family, the rest of me was increasingly a mess. Sure, I was getting old in major league terms, but that wasnt the main thing dragging me down. Mistreating everything that wasnt my left arm was putting my gift at greater risk than any elbow injury. I had to find a way to reconcile my physical talent with the weirdness and weakness and rage and love insideto lift myself, all of myself, this time.

So here I was standing in a damp cinder-block storage room under Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles, wearing my Yankees T-shirt and my gray uniform pants, at ten oclock on a Sunday morning, searching for another bottle of Hennessy. Ever since I got to the ballpark Id been going back and forth from the clubhouse to the storage room, pouring myself drinks. In half an hour I was scheduled to throw a bullpen, my workout between starts. And I was so blasted I couldnt walk straight. Id come back from three surgeries and fought through hundreds of hangovers; the one thing I could always do was throw when I was supposed to throw. But now the room was spinning. There was no way I could take the ball and throw it without embarrassing myself. Man, what am I doing?

This drinking spree hadnt started for the reasons you might expect. Three days earlier, on Thursday night, I had gotten the start with a whole lot on the line, after a tough regular season. The team had been in first place, or close to it, in the American League East for most of the season; in early August we stretched our lead to six games and had visions of winning another World Series title after a six-year drought. I know that six years between championships doesnt sound like a long time if youre a fan of the Cubs or the Mariners or a whole bunch of other teams. But in the Bronx, six years is an eternity; worse, we hadnt even made the playoffs in two years. In 2015, for the first time in two decades, we were playing without Derek Jeter, the all-time-great shortstop and Yankees icon, who had retired at the end of the previous season. But we still had Carlos Beltrn and Brian McCann and Alex Rodriguez and Masahiro Tanaka, and we felt like we had a real shot. Then, in late August, we started to fade. In September the slide accelerated. Mark Teixeira, our first baseman and one of our best hitters, fouled a ball off his shin and somehow it never healed. Our best starting pitcher, Nathan Eovaldi, went down with a sore elbow. Suddenly we were scratching for just a wild-card playoff spot.