NEW YORK | CC Sabathia can still pick out the time and place he first saw Cliff Lee pitch, even as seven seasons have been indexed on top of the game and the pitchers have crisscrossed each other in different leagues.
It was Sept. 15, 2002. Sabathia was in his second full season in the majors a year after winning 17 games as a rookie for the Cleveland Indians. Lee was making his first big league start as a September call-up. Sabathia was a physical specimen - an overpowering 6-foot-7 lefty taken in the first round of the 1998 draft. Lee took a circuitous route through the minors and arrived after a trade with Montreal earlier that summer.
Yet that night, in the Metrodome against recently crowned AL Central champion Minnesota, Sabathia wasn’t the left-hander commanding all of the attention.
“He went out and dealt,” Sabathia recalled. “He was the Cliff that he is now. He went out and pounded both sides of the plate - attacking, real aggressive in the strike zone.”
Soon after, the left-handers forged a friendship that would carry them through five more seasons in Cleveland, including one that brought them within a victory of the World Series in 2007. Then each was shipped out - first Sabathia, then Lee - as they got too expensive.
Now the friends Wednesday night will be where they thought they would be all along: pitching in the same World Series. Sabathia, the New York Yankees’ $162.5 million ace, will oppose Lee (who was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies this summer) in Game 1 at Yankee Stadium. The moment is a little out of focus for the former teammates, but it’s here.
“It’s just weird because a couple years ago we were talking about maybe pitching in a World Series together. Now we’re in different clubhouses,” Sabathia said. “It’s just a little weird, but it’ll be fun.”
The oddity of the moment hasn’t been lost on the Indians, who traded a reigning AL Cy Young winner two years in a row. Sabathia said he has gotten text messages from former teammates and Cleveland front office members telling him how strange it will be to watch the two pitch against each other. Then there’s the fact that Phillies manager Charlie Manuel, who brought Sabathia to the big leagues but was fired in 2002 after back-to-back 90-win seasons, has reached two straight World Series.
That Sabathia and Lee are facing each other in the World Series so soon after the Indians’ 2007 run is especially stunning. Sabathia and 23-year-old Fausto Carmona won 19 games apiece that season, and the Indians had a 3-1 lead on the Boston Red Sox in the ALCS.
Then they collapsed, with Sabathia losing Game 5 and Lee watching from the dugout after a disappointing season got him left off the playoff roster. Despite a 22-win season for Lee in 2008, the Indians were never a factor in the AL Central. Sabathia was traded to Milwaukee in July, Carmona struggled and Lee was shipped out this season as the Indians launched into full rebuilding mode, hiring former Nationals manager Manny Acta this week.
Since they left the Indians, Sabathia and Lee have thrived; the Brewers’ trade for Sabathia in July 2008 propelled them to their first playoff berth since 1982, and Sabathia figures to be in the top three of the Cy Young voting again in the AL this year after winning 19 games.
“You try not to have expectations of people that come in,” Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter said. “But if you sat down and mapped it out, I’m not sure you could have done it any better.”
Lee won his first five games in Philadelphia, becoming the staff ace as Cole Hamels struggled. He has a 0.74 ERA in the playoffs this year, and Sabathia’s 1.19 is almost as stellar.
The two faced each other once this year already, when the Indians came to New York for the first game at new Yankee Stadium. Before that game, Sabathia’s wife cooked the pitchers dinner at Sabathia’s house, and they talked about everything but baseball.
“That’s just something that doesn’t come up,” Sabathia said. “I got to know his family pretty well, and he got to know mine. Just things like that - just two regular guys talking about whatever.”
But when they were teammates, Lee said, each had a key role in the other’s development.
“I got to see him develop from a young pitcher that was borderline getting mad and throwing the ball as hard as he can to a guy where nothing fazed him,” Lee said. “I don’t know if I had anything to do with that, but watching him evolve into what he is now, I’d like to think I had something to do with it.”
They’ve both arrived now, one fighting against the other to win his first World Series. Maybe it would’ve been sweeter had it happened in Cleveland. But neither can do anything about that - other than to try to beat an old friend.
“I don’t know what they’re thinking in Cleveland, but I know we’re in for a good game,” Manuel said. “I know both pitchers are top-notch pitchers, and believe me, this matchup couldn’t have been better.”
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