CC Sabathia will be back in Milwaukee this week, and while he’s reflected fondly on his three months in a Brewers uniform back in 2008, he should still be mad about one aspect of it: not winning MVP. I’m mad, too.
It’s right there in the name: the award is supposed to go to the player who provided the most value to his team. Without him, the Brewers almost certainly don’t make the playoffs that year. With him, they snapped a 25-year drought of missed playoff berths, and have been in the mix to win their division since.
He may have just saved baseball in Milwaukee, and don’t take it from me.
The arrival of CC in the Brewers’ clubhouse on July 6, 2008, was “the transformation point for our organization,” Brewers principal owner Mark Attanasio reflected during an interview with Jomboy Media in 2020.
CC literally transformed a franchise for the better, but apparently that doesn’t provide enough “value” for the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Before ’08, the last time the Brewers made the playoffs was during Ronald Reagan’s second year in office and John Cougar’s “Jack & Diane” topped the Billboard 100. With CC and in the 14 complete seasons since, the Brewers have made the playoffs six times. (The MLB has expanded the playoffs multiple times since the mid-’90s, making it easier for the Brewers to make the playoffs, but I digress.)
“The biggest trade I ever made (was for CC),” says Doug Melvin, who was the Brewers’ general manager at the time and currently serves as a senior advisor to the team, as he spoke with Milwaukee Magazine over the phone from semi-retirement in Utah earlier this month. He didn’t bother to hide his pride about how he aggressively sealed the deal to acquire Sabathia three weeks before the trade deadline, after three weeks of schmoozing Cleveland’s front office.
“This trade had the most impact not only on an organization but on the City of Milwaukee,” he humble-brags. As The Journal Sentinel reported at the time, the speed at which the Brewers were selling tickets increased by 800% in the two days between the trade being finalized and CC’s first start at Miller Park; more than 42,500 fans were in the building for his Brewers debut on July 8, 2008. That homestand was the best-selling up to that time in the history of the Brewers.
That’s just a little bit of his off-the-field impact. Let’s talk about on the mound, and at the plate.
You could argue that Sabathia had the best half-seasons in baseball history, and he still somehow didn’t receive a single No. 1 MVP vote.
- Sabathia appeared in 17 out of the Brewers’ 73 final games, with the Brewers winning 14 behind CC’s absurdly good 1.65 ERA. He finished it off by pitching 21⅓ innings in the season’s final nine days, taking the ball on short rest and allowing just two earned runs as the Brewers miraculously made the playoffs for the first time since 1982.
- In those 17 starts, he threw seven complete games, three of which were shutouts. Only one MLB pitcher in 2022 had more than three complete games all season: Sandy Alcantara in Miami, who went the distance six times. Nobody has had more than seven complete games in a season since 2011. CC did that in half a season!
- He was no Shohei Ohtani, dominating with the bat and as a pitcher, but CC also hit a crucial solo home run on July 13 in a game that the Brewers ended up winning by one. His hitting again came in clutch on Sept. 5 and Sept. 10, when he had an RBI in each game, and the Brewers won each game by one. (Another example of why there should be a constitutional amendment outlawing the designated hitter, but that’s a rant for another day.)
- CC led the Brewers in Wins Above Replacement (a catch-all, advanced Sabermetric statistic) with 5.2 despite only being in a Brewers uniform for 46% of the team’s games and appearing in 10.4% of them. (I can’t find any examples of this ever happening in MLB history, where a midseason acquisition led his team in WAR with that team — more evidence that the Sabathia pre-trade deadline transaction was perhaps the best in baseball history.)
Sabathia did something for the Brewers in the back half of 2008 that shouldn’t happen in modern baseball; players who only appear in 17 out of 162 games shouldn’t be the team’s most impactful player — but CC was.
More than baseball
In a 2021 Washington Post retrospective on CC’s 2008, entitled “CC Sabathia’s summer of Black brotherhood,” CC was quoted as saying “I just fit in” in Milwaukee’s diverse clubhouse, a contrast to Cleveland’s heavily caucasian roster. Prior to coming to Milwaukee, he had kind of been labeled as a loner. He just didn’t fit in with his past teammates, but he did in Milwaukee, where he blossomed into a likely future Hall of Famer.
What could have been
Milwaukee was 9 games above .500 on July 7 and ended the year 18 games above .500, making the playoffs by a margin of just one game. Only the greatest of the great pitchers in baseball history could have carried a team like that, considering the Brewers’ hitting flagged at the end of the season, ace Ben Sheets got injured in September, and the Crew was without star prospect-and-ace-to-be Yovani Gallardo for most of the year. How is this not the paramount example of a single player providing value?
“If we had Gallardo in September and Sheets healthy all year … I think we had a chance to go a little deeper,” Melvin tells me.
When Milwaukee made it to the 2008 playoffs without a single win to spare, everything CC had done mattered; he provided hope for a ballclub and fan base that had been among the dregs of professional baseball for the better part of three decades. He made every game for three months must-watch baseball. That’s value.
I don’t think you, Dear MilMag Reader, are getting this. CC should have been the MVP in 2008, and not even one baseball writer voted for him. It’s been 15 years and I’m still livid.
Albert Pujols won the National League MVP that year with probably the best statistical season of his Hall of Fame career. How much value did he provide to his team that year, though? His St. Louis Cardinals missed the playoffs, falling behind the Brewers in the wild card race — thanks to CC. (Tim Lincecum won the NL Cy Young Award, despite his team also missing the playoffs.)
“If we don’t get to the playoffs in ’08? There’s no doubt that that (trade) changed the culture of our organization,” Melvin reflects. “Before 2008, players weren’t really interested in playing in Milwaukee … Players now have interest in playing there.”
For that, Milwaukee owes CC a thank you.
He’ll get a big thanks soon. On Aug. 25, he’s due to be back in what is now American Family Field to throw out the ceremonial first pitch as the Brewers find themselves in another competitive playoff race.
This isn’t a joke. My fantasy football league from 2008 until around 2012 was named “We Got CC” every year because we were still excited about it, even though CC took a record-breaking payday to join the New York Yankees just a few months after carrying the Crew to the playoffs. In 2009, Sabathia won the World Series in the Pinstripes.
I’m still jealous.
