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  But when this issue is raised in the car with Boone, he doesn’t bat an eye. Despite attempts to engage him about the Sox, and the difficulty of managing against a rival that seems to do everything right, Boone keeps circling back to his players, saying that they are his only focus. Even asking about the crapshoot of playing a wild-card game fails to get a rise from him. “I mean, what good does worrying do for anyone?” he says. “Of course I like it when the Red Sox lose, but either we’re good enough or we aren’t. If all you’re gonna do is worry about results, you’ll just play tight and lose.” From day one in Tampa, his doctrine to the players has been: Let the competition decide. Consume every metric, sharpen your mechanics, and take care of your body between starts. But once you’ve done those things . . . screw it, play the game. Let the competition decide.

  As if to test his dictate, brake lights loom ahead: traffic suddenly bunches up on the Deegan. Boone checks his navigation: there are stop-and-go delays to the exit for 95. He gives a semi-shrug and settles in his seat. It’s more than five hours till first pitch. Apparently, once a man’s had his chest wall split open, some light bumper-to-bumper doesn’t churn his heart.

  There are—or so we’ve heard—three phases of a man’s pride. In phase one, he’s the teen who won’t keep his shirt on, doffing it at the park (or the dinner table) to share his peach-fuzzed six-pack with the world. In phase two, he’s got dad-flab and won’t take his shirt off, aghast at what’s become of himself since college. In phase three, our balding geezer has given up caring and parades around the house in shirtless glory, patting his paunch in contentment. Generally, phase-three man is either past or approaching sixty and free of the things that once perturbed him. Sex and parenting and blunted ambition—all those worries are well behind him. What lies ahead now are the many comforts of the fridge and a free hand with the remote.

  Unless, of course, the man is CC Sabathia, a great grizzly of a guy who’s found a second prime at the age of thirty-eight. To watch him in the clubhouse sans shirt, grinning as he lugs around that three-roll mass, is to see a man so comfortable in his skin, you’d think he got a back rub from Buddha. Every day is a gift now, a karmic reward for the kindness he’s shown others in his career. It’s also an affirmation of who he’s become: the wise old monk who had a crisis of the soul and came through it renewed and secure. During the car ride, Boone praises CC as the keeper of “our culture,” a leader whose jollity sets the tone in the room and whose steadiness keeps it on course. In temperament, Boone and CC are like psychic twins: optimists at peace with where life has brought them and protectors of that precious thing called team. With some help from Judge and Didi, they’ve spun a tight structural web that can take the wind and rain.

  Sabathia, a warhorse of eighteen seasons in the bigs, is surprised and delighted to still be here. “Yeah, I’m old!” he exclaimed, with a raucous laugh, when told that he could be Gleyber Torres’s dad. “But I’m having more fun now than when I was young. It’s a great team to [play on]. I’m just—happy.” He knows it could go away at any second; his health is pitch to pitch, not week to week. “Some days, if I’ve had a bad game, I’m like, ‘That’s it, I’m going home!’” he said, sitting at his locker. “But when I’m throwing the ball well, it’s like, ‘I could do this for five years.’ It all depends how my health holds up.”

  He has bone-on-bone arthritis in his right, or landing, knee, and he’s facing joint replacement when he retires. He must also win nightly stare-downs with the minibar, at least when the Yanks are on the road. This is his third season of sobriety. Oh, and it’s been years since he lost the hair on his splendid four-seam fastball. Time was, from 2001 till the 2012 season, Sabathia would rock back, pause his high-kick windup, and blow 97 by you up and in. Beating a hitter who’s sitting on hard stuff is like dunking over LeBron: a pitcher’s primal scream of brute dominion. All the great ones did it until they didn’t, and very few had the verve to win without it. Warren Spahn, Bob Feller, Tom Seaver, Pedro Martínez—only a select group had the wit and want-to to reinvent themselves at thirty-five. All of those men are in the Hall of Fame. Sabathia, if there’s any justice, will join them there.

  As beloved as Judge is on the streets of New York, he runs second to Sabathia in the clubhouse. Among pitchers and the kids who’ve joined the team these last two years, Sabathia is the teddy bear at the back of the room, a merry combination of Cliff Huxtable and Dr. Phil, with some Cedric the Entertainer tossed in. Before every home game, he holds a raucous chat with four or five guys grouped around him—Betances and Severino, Sonny Gray and Jordan Montgomery (who spent more of the year on the disabled list), plus one or two of the arms on the Scranton shuttle. They might be yakking about LeBron as an LA Laker or the Eagles’ chances of repeating in the NFC, but what’s actually going on there is a therapy session disguised as front-porch patter. Everyone’s laughing and talking past each other and getting the last word in—and none of them are worrying about their lousy outing the night or two before.

  Sabathia’s prime beneficiaries are Betances and Sonny Gray—Betances because he sometimes loses his release point and melts down on the mound, and Gray because he’s wound up like a top and needs to breathe out for half an hour. You can see it in his posture when he sits with CC. As his shoulders soften and his jaw unclamps, he looks about five years younger. That gift that Sabathia has for putting people at ease—you can’t overpraise its value to a team living under the gun. Each night the Yankees glance at the scoreboard in center and see the Red Sox winning . . . again. It’s both surreal and depleting, like a run-on dream of sprinting while your feet are tied together.

  When Sabathia arrived in 2009, he was no one’s idea of a guru. He was a sweet but reticent giant who seemed plainly relieved to play fifth fiddle on a team. “Jeter and A-Rod and Posada and Andy—all I was trying to do was fit in,” he tells us. “It was easier being a Yankee than an Indian or Brewer because I didn’t have to carry that team. It made life a whole lot simpler.”

  For four years, Sabathia was the Big Dependable. He won eighteen or nineteen games a season, pitched to an ERA in the low threes, and struck out a couple of hundred hitters. He’d been blessed with the setup to throw hard for eight innings: an industrial set of shoulders, tractor-pull quads, and huge and rubbery hips. What you missed in all that mass was his pure athleticism—the agility to bring his knee to his chest and keep his weight centered over the slab as he launched off his plant leg to throw. Years ago, Dwight Gooden talked about his own windup, which was the most glorious motion in sports in the 1980s. A hundred times a game, he’d corkscrew at the waist, raise his left knee till it almost grazed his chin, then plow through to finish over that knee. But come the nineties, he could barely lift the foot to his waist—and even that was hell for five innings. “That’s where you lose the power, when your legs are stiff and you can’t finish off pitches,” Doc observed.

  It was worse for Sabathia, who was transferring all that torque to a joint ground down by attrition. Though he didn’t tell anyone about the pain, it loused up his follow-through. His stride got shorter as he favored the knee, taking miles and revolutions off his heater. Suddenly, he threw 92, not 97, leaving it up in the zone. That’s a recipe for a beating, and Sabathia caught one, trying to grit through with off-speed stuff. By the summer of ’13, the guy who took pride in going deep into games couldn’t get out of the sixth inning. Opposing hitters crushed him in his third turn through the order, batting .370 against him through season’s end. As bad as getting kicked around by Boston was, worse was being pressed by the tabloid guys to explain his plodding fastball. He’d always stood tall at his locker after games, talking till the last guy left. Now he got surly and scarce. When he wasn’t in the trainer’s room, he gave clipped answers and resented the writers who asked the questions.

  That season—2013—was hell for everyone. Teixeira hurt his wrist at the World Baseball Classic and spent most of the year healing, or trying to. Curtis Granderson was plunked t
wice and missed 101 games with a fractured forearm and finger. Alex Rodríguez was popped for steroids by the commissioner’s office, but got the suspension stayed for a year. All summer, reporters camped out at his locker. It was like covering Reggie back in the day. You had to be there just in case another land mine went off.

  A-Rod’s ban the following year and the signing of B-plus stars (Ellsbury, Beltrán, McCann) did nothing to improve the mood. Jeter’s farewell tour and its ceaseless coverage in the press sucked the air from the room. It seemed as though the Yankees were stuck in the doldrums. Sabathia, mired in his own despond, couldn’t help with morale that season. The pain in his knee was so bad that he stopped pitching in May and spent the rest of the season in grueling rehab. He’d been told that he would need a joint replacement, and the stopgap measure—repeat injections of Orthovisc, a synthetic goo that mimics cartilage—wasn’t taking. Up against the end of a grand career, Sabathia numbed his sorrows with booze. He didn’t drink in public or show up to the park reeking, but something was clearly wrong with him. You could see it in his bearing, a kind of dull fatigue that tracked him on the field and off.

  By the 2015 season, word got around that CC’s boozing had spiked after road games. He’d hole up in his suite, where no one could see him, and wipe out the stock in his mini-fridge. That August he was filmed outside a bar in Toronto, gesturing and yelling taunts at a patron. As blows began to fly, someone stuffed him into a sedan, missing one of his shoes. Six weeks later, he checked into a clinic at the urging of his wife. Sabathia broke the news on the last day of the season. He was somewhere in treatment when the Yanks played the Astros in a wild-card game at the Stadium. His absence italicized the Yanks’ shutout loss. Sabathia and his team had bottomed out.

  All of which made for a certain symmetry: as Sabathia went, so went the Yankees. Since he signed in ’09, his movements and the team’s had closely mirrored each other, beginning with their triumph that title season. Over the next three years, CC and the team would both have fine regular seasons and hard-to-figure pratfalls in October. Ditto the dark years of 2013–2015, when everything went south at once: injuries, scandals, old age having its way. This pattern made their joint resurrection in 2016 all the more stunning to behold. Sabathia came to camp that spring humbled and clear-eyed after his treatment in rehab. He spoke candidly to the press about losing his way when his body began to break down. “I was tired of being in the dark about [my drinking],” he told the News. “I had dealt with it from the end of 2012 to that point. It was more exhausting than actually drinking—trying to hide [it].”

  CC’s fastball was gone, but he’d come to terms with that too and was committed to pitching without it. He’d found an expensive knee brace that stabilized the joint and kept the bones from rubbing against each other. It wasn’t a perfect fix: the thing was huge and clumsy, making it hard to field his position. If you laid one down on him, you’d have yourself a hit—and a pitch between your ears in your next at-bat.

  But the other work-around, the cutter taught him by Andy Pettitte? That was an unqualified triumph. There are essentially three fastballs that pitchers use these days. The most common, the four-seamer, travels straight and true and is the one thrown at peak velocity. The two-seamer tails and dips at the plate, acting like a harder changeup; Max Scherzer has the best one on the planet. And the cutter, as perfected by Mo Rivera, breaks late and hard on lefty hitters, sawing the bat off in their hands. What Sabathia was pleased to learn was that his cutter and two-seamer look exactly alike to hitters. They come in at virtually the same speed—90.2 miles per hour for the two-seamer, 88.9 for the cutter—but veer in opposite ways that last split second. Better still, he can throw them with a draftsman’s precision to either side of the plate.

  Instead of swings and misses, he now gets feeble hacks from hitters who’ve been fooled by the location of his pitch. He can still run his four-seam up there at 93 and generally flashes it a couple times a game. But soft contact leads to shorter at-bats and longer, more productive outings. Since August of ’16, when he mastered the cutter, he’s averaged six innings a start, has an ERA of 3.46, and has won twice as many games as he’s lost. Over that span, only a handful of pitchers have been better at producing soft outs. None of them, safe to say, have pitched on one knee or done more with less arm speed than CC Sabathia.

  It’s funny how these things work in baseball. Back in ’15, when Sabathia had an ERA in the high fours and a salary of $24 million, the Yankees couldn’t wait for him to quit. All their restless talk of “getting under the luxury tax” was a memo to CC and A-Rod: Retire! The money they’d save when those two left could be spent on a pair of fresh horses. They’d have a choice card to pick from if they bided their time: José Fernández, Matt Harvey, and Clayton Kershaw would be free agents in the golden class of ’19. Fernández, the marvel who’d made two All-Star Games before he turned twenty-four, would almost surely have leapt at a Yankee offer. He and Stanton, good friends and teammates in Miami, talked openly about going to the Bronx when they hit the free-agent market. But one night near the end of the ’16 season, Fernández got high and drunk on his boat and plowed it into a jetty at fifty knots. He and two of his buddies were killed on impact. In June of that season, Harvey’s arm gave out for the second time in four years. (He returned the following season a ghost of himself, shredded by overuse and New York’s nightlife. He eventually got dealt to the Cincinnati Reds for Devin Mesoraco.) The same month Harvey went down, Kershaw came up lame. The three-time Cy Young winner threw a disc and would miss chunks of the next three seasons with a back condition and lose four or five miles off his fastball.

  In short, none of those stallions proved as sturdy—or bankable—as the old doughy guy in the knee brace. When Sabathia’s deal vested for an option for 2017, per the terms of the extension he signed in 2011, the Yankees gladly re-upped him in ’18. At $10 million, Sabathia was a steal, the rare case of Cashman getting off cheap.

  In 2017, Sabathia was 10-0 in starts after Yankees losses. More importantly, he was 4-0 against Boston, the team pitchers are judged by in the Bronx. It was more of the same for most of ’18: he went undefeated against winning teams and posted his biggest wins after Yankee losses. That’s how you avoid the kind of slide that can cost you a division title. In 2018, the Yanks were the last team in baseball to drop three games in a row; meanwhile, they ran off seven streaks of three or more wins. Homers aside, it wasn’t entirely clear how they kept on winning. None of their franchise hitters were having great years, and one of their most dangerous hitters, Sánchez, was batting .190. Their starters were slightly better than projected—with the exception of Gray, who was dreadful—and their fielding stats were middle-of-the-pack, hurt by rookie gaffes from Torres and Andújar. It was mostly resilience—a miscellaneous toughness—that kept the Yanks within striking distance of the Sox. No one better embodied that grit than Sabathia. Start after start, he’d go out there throwing soft-serve and hand a lead or a close game to the pen. At bargain wages, he was what Tanaka and Severino weren’t: a certifiable stopper. He nipped slumps before they had a chance to happen and gave the Yanks a chance each time he pitched.

  Of course, it’s never a stellar sign when a team’s most trusted starter is a gimpy vet closing in on forty. For all of New York’s wins, there were cracks in the foundation, a gnawing sense that the center might not hold. In too many games, the Yanks failed at small-ball basics—moving a runner along, getting a bunt down when it mattered—while waiting on three-run shots to bust it open. They struck out far too often for a team chasing a title; in the AL, only Texas and the White Sox were whiffing at a greater rate. And the bullpen, while mostly brilliant, was beginning to tire, since the starters rarely gave them seven innings.

  Every team has holes, even the very best ones. The Red Sox lacked relievers to hand leads to Craig Kimbrel. The Astros needed a closer and at least another bat, after passing on J. D. Martinez in the winter. But those clubs weren’t five games out and bu
rning through their gas to keep up. Cashman wasn’t available to check his gauges; he and his staff were hunkered down till the trading deadline. But weeks before the deadline at the end of July, pressure mounted on him to make an impact deal. His team was short a starter capable of going deep into games and proving he could beat the Sox, a rental catcher who could sub for the ailing Sánchez, and a guy to spell Judge a day or two in right while hitting something besides homers off the bench.

  Meanwhile—inevitably—the Yanks began to stall. They’d lost Sánchez the first time on June 24, and a month later he’d return to the DL. (In total, he’d miss two months of the season.) Torres strained a hip in early July and missed three weeks around the All-Star break. Then Severino, the Cy Young leader through June, suddenly hit the skids and stopped winning. He couldn’t command his fastball, which stayed up in the zone. It got smoked, early and often, for loud hits. In his first nineteen starts, batters hit .214 against his high-test heater. Over the next four, they hit .397. But something else was off: Severino was tipping pitches. As Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci was the first to note, Severino had a tell when he pitched from a windup. He raised his left heel higher to throw a slider than a fastball, flushing the value of his second-best pitch. He didn’t have much of a changeup, so hitters sat on his hard stuff when he pitched with the bases empty. For five innings, they’d pound him and fatten his pitch count, then finish him off in the sixth.