The myth of CC Sabathia

By Rick Morris

Since the Cy Young Award is based purely on the regular season, it's defensible for the baseball writers to have given the American League honors to CC Sabathia. While I probably would have voted for Josh Beckett, it seems to me a very close call that could have gone either way.

But for the Sabathia homers who claim that he has grown up into an automatic shut-down ace and that the postseason represented an aberration from the level he has reached -- think again.

In response to the inane talking points about CC not winning 20 games SOLELY because of the admittedly poor run support he received, recently on SportsTalkNetwork.com, I cited from memory numerous examples of Sabathia having coughed up leads and costing the team games. Because I don't like to go purely on anecdotal evidence, I went to the trouble of substantiating these examples, courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com.

^ July 29: He gives up a 1-0 lead to Minnesota, team loses 4-1.
^ August 8: He gives up a 1-0 lead to Chicago, team loses 6-4.
^ August 14: He gives up a 2-0 first-inning lead to Detroit, team loses 6-2.
^ August 19: He gives up a 2-1 lead to Tampa Bay, team loses 4-3.

And all of these examples were within a month! It should be noted that none of the opposing lineups bore any resemblance to the '27 Yankees, either.

Now, not every ace wins every game. But pitchers with the assassin mentality win these games more often than not. Look no further than the same pitching staff. You'd have to manually disembowel Fausto Carmona to affect him mentally, and even then he'd keep coming back at you!

Just keep this in mind when CC's record gets whitewashed by the usual apologists in Cleveland.