CC Sabathia's biggest Yankees win was healing the Derek Jeter-Alex Rodriguez divide

New York Times

13 hours ago

As a Yankee, CC Sabathia was a unanimous MVP — most valuable personality. Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez would never have won a championship together without Sabathia's generosity of spirit and his talent for knocking down walls.
On the day of his Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown (N.Y.), it was worth remembering that CC is the reason Yankees fans are living through a 15-year championship drought, not a 24-year championship drought. And counting.
Brian Cashman visited Sabathia at his California home after the 2008 season. The Yankees general manager was desperate after the fragile Jeter-Rodriguez partnership had produced a cataclysmic ALCS loss to Boston in 2004, three straight ALDS defeats in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and then a non-playoff season in 2008, the final year in the old Yankee Stadium.
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Jeter and Rodriguez were literally and figuratively carrying their baggage across the street to the new building — A-Rod had irreparably harmed their friendship with comments in past interviews meant to diminish Jeter's greatness — and Cashman was hellbent on doing something about it.
Sabathia wanted to sign a free-agent contract with the Dodgers and had no interest in being courted by the Yankees. He was leery of the New York media and of the No. 1 storyline in the Bronx.
'CC's main concern was our clubhouse, and how people got along,' Cashman told me months after Sabathia helped the Yankees win a World Series title in 2009.
'We had a reputation for not being together. We had a reputation of fighting each other, and that was a big concern there.'
So the GM came up with a plan. He decided to come clean with a three-time All-Star who put a priority on team harmony.
'Yeah, we are broken,' Cashman told Sabathia. 'One reason we're committing ($161 million) to you is you're a team builder. We need somebody to bring us all together.'
Forever enshrined in baseball history 💙#LegaCCy | @CC_Sabathia pic.twitter.com/ST75oPn4DU
— New York Yankees (@Yankees) July 27, 2025
After a couple of sit-downs at the winter meetings in Las Vegas, Cashman said he entered this seminal home visit 'trying to be John Calipari.' It was the toughest recruiting pitch of Cashman's career because Sabathia had good sources all across the sport. The pitcher knew what former Yankees the likes of Gary Sheffield thought of the working environment that existed around the Jeter-A-Rod fault line.
'When I got there,' Sheffield said recently on the All the Smoke podcast, 'I saw the dysfunction right away. … You could feel the tension. I mean, every single day you could feel it.'
Cashman had lived that tension for five seasons. Back when he was locked in trade negotiations with Texas for A-Rod, the GM didn't tell Jeter or team president Randy Levine about the pending deal until he absolutely had to. Cashman knew that he was playing with fire. Intense fire. He was acquiring his captain's notorious frenemy — a fellow megastar shortstop — and moving him to third base to form what the GM called 'arguably the best left side of the infield in the history of baseball.'
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The relationship's rock bottom arrived during a blowout loss to Baltimore in 2006, when Jeter stared at A-Rod after the two bumped into each other and allowed a popup to fall to the dirt. Cashman asked his manager, Joe Torre, to speak to his shortstop about improving his relationship with Rodriguez. Torre declined, leaving Cashman to handle it on his own, to charge the captain to lead everyone, A-Rod included.
'You've got to do a better job with Alex as far as embracing him,' Cashman told Jeter.
To his credit, Jeter did make efforts to rebuild a connection with Rodriguez. But the drama seemed to swallow up the annual franchise mission statement of winning it all. One club official said he would never ask Jeter about his relationship with A-Rod because 'it would've been like approaching Joe DiMaggio to talk to him about Marilyn Monroe.'
This is what Cashman was confronting when he tried to sign Sabathia, who was known to host cookouts with his Cleveland teammates and who had won over his Milwaukee teammates with his outsized personality and willingness to risk his left arm and a big free-agent score to throw … and throw … and throw.
CC was the perfect unifying force. Cashman sold him on all the comforts of New York area suburbia and assured him the market set up perfectly for his wife Amber and their children. 'I had to make him a Yankee,' the GM said.
The Dodgers weren't showing the same interest, and that helped Cashman's cause. So did Amber Sabathia, who told her husband that he shouldn't sell himself short as a potential difference-maker in the Yankee clubhouse. 'I had been a big part of why the Cleveland clubhouse was fun, and why we won, even if I didn't want to take credit,' Sabathia wrote in his autobiography, Till The End. 'I was ready for the free-agency uncertainty to be over. Right there, I decided to sign with the Yankees.'
The big man decided to work in a place he had described as 'toxic.' The Yankees had no idea how lucky they were that Carsten Charles Sabathia had accepted their seven-year deal. Cashman likened the 6-6, 300-pound lefty to Santa Claus, and CC ended up being the gift who kept on giving.
During spring training, Sabathia told a visitor to his locker of a dream he kept having night after night. 'The parade,' he said.
A ticker-tape parade.
'I would love to meet President Obama,' he said, 'but I keep thinking about that parade and just how good that will feel. Just tons of people and confetti all over the place. That's the dream I keep having. It's something I've been thinking about a lot.'
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Sabathia had already arranged to take teammates Joba Chamberlain, A.J. Burnett, Chien-Ming Wang and Brian Bruney to Orlando Magic games. Chemistry matters. So do the superstars who promote it.
Sabathia won 19 games as his Yankees went 103-59. It helped that the manager, Joe Girardi, had lightened up in his second year on the job after reading up on how Tom Coughlin had lightened up on the Giants.
Sabathia didn't need to lighten up. Just by being his gentle-giant self, Sabathia established relationships with Jeter and A-Rod and everyone else in pinstripes and had a blast. He sucked the tension out of the room long before he won MVP honors in the ALCS victory over the Angels and finished with an ERA of 1.98 in five postseason starts.
After the Yankees beat the Phillies in the World Series, Jeter and Rodriguez jumped into each other's arms. The picture was published everywhere because players, coaches, executives and fans never thought they'd see it.
CC Sabathia was the one who booked that photo shoot. His heart was always as big as his talent, and that's why he was busy in Cooperstown on Sunday living out his dreams.
(Photo of Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez (13) celebrating their World Series title in 2009: Nick Laham / Getty Images)