CC Sabathia Opens Up About His Alcoholism

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/york-yankees-cc-sabathia-struggle-alcoholism-35017763

Looks like CC is out of rehab and gave his first interview since shockingly checking himself into rehab on the last day of the season. When the news broke I think we all figured that eventually there was going to be a bigger story, and there may still be, but it sounds like he was just a classic alcoholic. We were all shocked and some of us upset at him for picking that time to go away but at the same time if it was a knee or any other kind of injury, we would have understood that he couldn’t “pitch through the pain”.

When he goes into the details of drinking alone for weekends at a time in his hotel room, during road trips, I had 3 main thoughts.

1. Imagine if he wasn’t married? I think the drinking in the hotel rooms is so you don’t get caught doing anything else that jeopardizes your marriage and family. But if he’s single, he’s basically Johnny Football, just out partying non-stop and probably all over the news for it. A rich drunk guy can only be out for so long before a model or video hoe makes you and offer you can’t don’t want to refuse.
2. What did those hotel room service bills look like? Hotel booze is not cheap and big guys need a lot of booze. The combination of those 2 things means that his itemized bill at checkout over a 3 day weekend, had to look like one of the bills we see when and NFL team puts the whole bill on a rookie.
3. How sweet must it be to pitch on Thursday before a road trip? You basically get to for see a city for the weekend and all you have to do is throw a bullpen once. Drink all night, then show up and bullshit in the dugout while watching a game in what are basically pajama pants, then do it all again. Now I get why Adam Warren was upset going to the pen.

At the end of the day, whats most important is his health and family, but I don’t but it for a second that being an alcoholic had no impact on him on the field. He says that he realized there was a problem in 2012 at the end of the season, and looking at the results he’s had on the field, there’s a huge difference from 2012 on.

Hopefully clean and sober, we will see shades of old CC in 2016 because he is coming to camp as a starter.