ON HIS BATTLE

••••• Sabathia tells his autobiographical tale as something of a visualized personal essay about his celebrated baseball career -- self-narrated, but buttressed with footage of his career and testimony from his loved ones. He of course, shows many of the on-field highlights, the Cy Young in Cleveland, the dominant, season-saving pitching during his pennant race in Milwaukee, his World Championship in New York, and his comfy suburban dad life in Alpine, NJ, hanging with wife, Amber, their four children.

But, Sabathia makes a consistent refrain: “The end of a story don’t mean anything unless you know everything that came before it.”

And so, with his film comes a searing presentation of the pain he carried. When Sabathia sat in front of the camera to discuss his father’s death in 2003, one accelerated by addiction that foreshadowed his own, CC cried like it happened last night.

“He was the one telling me I would play for the Yankees,” CC told the News of Carsten Charles “Corky” Sabathia, Sr -- the man who gave him not just his name but his love of baseball.

Sabathia’s parents divorced when he was entering adolescence, but Sabathia was close with his father before he died, and his life growing up in Vallejo, CA runs counter to a dominant narrative of broken, dysfunctional Black homes wholly defined by lack of strong male leaders. “My dad’s older brother — his name is Edwin — you can see him on the float in ’09 after we won the World Series,” said Sabathia, who said he regretted not including in the film. “He’s one of the closest people to me in my life, so yeah I do have that mentor.”

However, nothing compares to losing a dad, an unaddressed grief only compounded by losing his cousin Demetrius Davis, who died of a heart attack in 2013. Sabathia locates see his long refusal to address his emerging alcoholism and the sadness underlying it — Sabathia shares in the film that he would hide cocktails in sports water bottles after games, and once crashed his Cutlass while driving drunk — as one best understood by the expectation placed on Black men to remain stoic.

It’s one Sabathia hopes to correct by unveiling his struggle, both on film and his upcoming autobiography “Till The End,” which he co-authored with Chris Smith.

“People think therapy and health and all these things are like so taboo...especially being a Black man. It’s hard to sometimes step up and say that you need help.”

Amber Sabathia, Sabathia’s wife and high school sweetheart, executive produced the film and spoke extensively about his struggles with authority as a first-hand witness.

“He was really big on ‘ out of sight, out of mind,’” Amber told the News. “And I think that a lot of families have, definitely in the Black community, deal with (issues) like, ‘If we don’t talk about it, it didn’t happen.’

That inclination to keep everything quiet was, at first, only compounded by the public facing baseball career.

“CC was in the spotlight. I couldn’t just go to the Yankees and tell them he had a problem, right? Because it’s his job. I never wanted to affect his career,” said Amber. She admits that “it was hard not having someone that can kind of have my back and try and get him help” in the sport.

But Amber told the News that she began going to therapy herself in 2012. And, she would regularly consult with Sabathia’s mother, Margie, as someone to “complain and cry” as CC continued to decline, taking care of each other while urging him to take care of himself.

“I always joke: ‘Everyone is scared of CC, but the only ones who aren’t scared are me and his mother.”

Sabathia finally made a decision for himself upon finally hitting a new low in 2015, brawling in nightclubs and binging so hard he couldn’t complete a bullpen tuneup ahead of the 2015 postseason. When he entered rehab, the Sabathias say they didn’t encounter stigmatization from the

Yankees, but unified support. CC checked in with the help of his then-teammates Chris Young and Dellin Betances. And instead of baseball being an obstacle towards his recovery, preserving his career became a driving force to get his life back on track.

Both of the Sabathias say they have spoken to men and women in baseball suffering with addiction issues.The pair sees their work in his retirement as a means of helping people in the sport and outside it find the help they need, which starts with being open and honest about their issues.

CC still describes himself as “introverted” and “super private” by nature. “I’ve never read in front of the class as a kid or s--t like that.”

He’s being transparent when he needs to be, which he tells people in and around the game that seek his advice. (“I see my therapist one on one. And my therapist knows me. That’s just the way I do it.) And telling his complete story is a necessary part of this process.

“I think getting him to go public with rehab and being open about his different substance abuse and different things he was battling helped him realize that talking about it and being open about it is part of the therapy,” said Amber. “It’s part of the work that he put in.”

They’re still talking about it, even when the cameras aren’t rolling. The Sabathias told the News that their four children were too young to see his worst moments when they happened, save for their oldest son, Carsten Charles “Lil’ C” Sabathia III, who was 12 when his dad checked into rehab. So, they screened the film at home before it broadcasts across the country. “It was a lot for them to process,” said Amber. “But I wanted to give them time to ask any questions to really dive deep into it.”

So the Sabathia kids spoke openly with their mom, dad, and each other about addiction and loss. And together, they cried.