CLEVELAND — Carl Willis will never forget CC Sabathia’s first professional bullpen session.
For one, because it was “electric. The baseball escaped his hand with ease. Each heater whistled as it zipped toward the plate.
Willis, his pitching coach in rookie ball in Burlington, N.C., stopped him and posed a simple question.
“Do you throw a four-seamer and a two-seamer?” Willis asked. “Or just the traditional four-seamer?”
“Man,” a 17-year-old Sabathia said, “I just grab it.”
Sabathia fired a few more pitches, and Willis noticed he hadn’t dug his cleats into a permanent starting point on the rubber. Willis asked where he typically stood on the mound. Sabathia replied that he never paid it much attention.
“I got really nervous,” Willis recalled last week.
The teenager was undeniably talented, a hefty workhorse with athleticism oozing from his pores. He was a project, though. With coaching and maturing, he could justify Cleveland’s investment of a first-round draft pick. At least, that was the hope when the Indians selected him 20th overall in 1998.
They certainly didn’t imagine that summer that Sabathia would wind up in the franchise’s Hall of Fame, or that he’d forge a probable path to Cooperstown. Willis remembers telling his wife that Sabathia had “a chance to be something special” and that he could blossom into an ace after years of mechanical refinement.
Willis remains on Sabathia’s Christmas card list. The two still laugh about those early days in the minors, in shoddy bullpens in small towns in Appalachia. They shared several stops along Sabathia’s quick ascent through the farm system and then reunited in Cleveland, where Sabathia won the American League Cy Young Award in 2007.
On Saturday, they’ll share another moment together as Sabathia enters Cleveland’s Hall of Fame.
“It just makes me smile,” Willis said.
Cleveland pitching coach Carl Willis, center, talks to pitcher CC Sabathia, right, during the 2007 ALDS. (Tony Dejak / Associated Press)
In June 1997, the Indians sent a group of scouting officials to the Team One Showcase, a multi-day spectacle at Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota, Fla. Lee MacPhail IV, Cleveland’s scouting director, watched an imposing slugger launch what he figured was a 500-foot moonshot to the opposite field.
“I maintain — and people look at me like I’m from Mars — this guy might have won a home run crown had he gone out as a hitter,” MacPhail said.
MacPhail said he harbors two regrets from his Cleveland tenure. He wished he would have accepted an invitation from the club’s area scout, Paul Cogan, to watch Sabathia on the basketball court, where he started at shooting guard for his high school team in Vallejo, Ca. He also wishes he would have had a chance to watch Sabathia take big-league batting practice.
“He could get in the box,” Willis said, “and it would put everybody else to shame.”
On the final day of that showcase, though, Sabathia flaunted what scouts had flocked to Florida to witness: his left arm.
It was difficult to get a clear read on him during his senior season. El Niño sprayed constant rain across the Bay Area, washing away some of his starts. MacPhail only watched him once, for five innings in a downpour. Sabathia could effortlessly rip a fastball past any hitter, but there were questions about his secondary stuff. His delivery needed an overhaul. As he strode toward the plate, his back side broke down, and his front foot landed in a less-than-ideal location.
As the 1998 draft approached, Cleveland’s scouting team tried to piece together how someone with his frame — 6-foot-6, 260 pounds at the time — and lack of polish might develop. MacPhail anticipated a five-year undertaking, one level at a time as he adjusted to professional conditioning and workload demands.
MacPhail remembers asking more seasoned experts to scroll through their mental archives to find an apt comparison in terms of body type and arsenal. The only name that surfaced was Bob Veale, a 6-foot-6 lefty for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Boston Red Sox who, though carrying a lankier frame, pitched in the majors for 13 years and offered some hope. Fernando Montes, the Indians’ strength and conditioning coach, relayed he wasn’t concerned, despite comparing Sabathia to Bob Whitfield, an offensive tackle for the Atlanta Falcons. There aren’t many pitchers being linked to those protecting a quarterback’s blind side from vicious edge rushers.
“We’ve never seen this body before,” MacPhail recalled wondering. “Where will this body be in five to 10 years?”
There was also a risk in drafting a high school pitcher in the first round for the second consecutive year. Cleveland had selected right-hander Tim Drew in 1997, and that made MacPhail nervous. This was his second year as architect of the team’s draft, and taking back-to-back high school pitchers — the prototypes with the greatest potential for disaster — might give off the wrong impression.
“You’re probably thinking you have a lot more job security than you do,” he said, laughing.
There was some internal debate about whether Sabathia was worth the investment, and they weren’t even certain he’d be available when they picked. They were worried about two teams ahead of them, but both clubs passed (in favor of players who never amounted to much in pro ball).
“The feeling of relief and joy in that room was palpable,” MacPhail said, “knowing he was going to be there for us at No. 20.”
Sabathia pitches in 2001. (Tom Pigeon / Allsport)
The Baltimore Orioles had indicated they would snag Sabathia at No. 26 if Cleveland passed on him. Baltimore was left with high school outfielder Rick Elder, who was in independent ball by the time he was 24. After the Sabathia selection, Orioles GM Pat Gillick called Cleveland’s brass and told them, “You got the best guy in the draft.”
It took time for that to materialize.
Willis remembers a bullpen session in Bluefield, W.V., in which he asked Sabathia if he had ever thrown a changeup. Sabathia said yes, and threw a handful of them. Later that day, Willis filed a report that mentioned Sabathia’s changeup. He was then inundated with calls from Cleveland officials, none of whom had ever seen Sabathia throw one.
“He was in high school throwing 97 (mph),” Willis said. “When would he ever need a changeup?”
Dave Miller, another pitching coach in Cleveland’s system, properly lined up Sabathia on the rubber one day in 1998. From there, his breaking ball became a weapon. MacPhail couldn’t believe how quickly the pitch jumped in quality. Miller wasn’t so surprised. He looked at MacPhail and said, simply: “Athlete.”
“People never give him enough credit for that,” Willis said.
Sabathia spent that first summer in rookie ball, and then breezed through three A-ball levels the following year. He made three dominant outings at Class-A Columbus in 1999, and Willis urged the organization’s decision-makers to send him to High A. He reached Double-A Akron in 2000, and the next spring, he broke camp with the big-league club, a 20-year-old joining a rotation with veterans Bartolo Colón, Chuck Finley (who was nearly twice his age), and Dave Burba (who was 14 years his senior).
He zoomed to the majors faster than anyone had anticipated and demonstrated immediate staying power. He finished second in the AL Rookie of the Year race (to Ichiro), and never looked back. Nearly two decades later, he called it a career. He evolved into the definition of a workhorse, a throwback, a durable hurler who piled up innings, strikeouts and accolades. He fired those fastballs past hitters until he had to reinvent himself as a crafty southpaw who leaned on the secondary stuff scouts were once unsure he possessed.
Sabathia won a Cy Young Award with Cleveland in 2007, with Willis as his pitching coach. He finished in the top five of the voting on four other occasions. He won 251 games, posted a 3.74 ERA, eclipsed the 3,000-strikeout mark (he ranks 18th all-time) and proved he was well worth that first-round pick.
No one would have envisioned it a quarter-century ago, but now?
“To see the meteoric rise,” MacPhail said, “knowing the kind of athlete he was and learning what kind of human being he was — in retrospect, it makes sense.”
(Photo of CC Sabathia during the 2007 ALCS: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
