CAN’T LOSE CC
BOMBERS PLAYING WITH FIRE ON VET
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — With all of their wheeling and dealing this offseason, constructing new plans on the fly and compelling us to recalculate their luxury-tax figure every day, the Yankees had best not forget to bring back their glue guy.
CC Sabathia has done too much for this franchise — and more importantly he means too much to it — to stand on the back of the line for too long.
With two straight solid years on the books after three lousy ones, the big lefty seems to have moved past his Blue Period and learned how to thrive with both diminished stuff and an eternally suspect right knee. And his roller-coaster ride of a time with the Yankees, including his battle with alcoholism, seems to have only strengthened his leadership quotient, which was already off the charts when he first put on the pinstripes nine years ago.
“Obviously, we have an interest in CC and [we’ll] see where that takes us,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman told a small group of reporters, including The Post’s George A. King III, Wednesday at the Winter Meetings. “We are engaged with other opportunities, whether trade market or making sure we are doing our assessments in the free-agent side as well. I don’t know where it will take us, but we are working on it.’’
Sabathia, a free agent for the first time since 2008, has made clear that he’d like to rejoin the Yankees, and it’s an open secret that his family wants to stay put in New Jersey. Nevertheless, the big lefty is a realist and not a pushover, and that’s why he met with Blue Jays brass at a hotel close to the meetings’ headquarters.
An industry person in the loop discussed the meeting as “Nothing serious”; Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro worked in the Indians’ front office when Cleveland drafted Sabathia out of high school in 1998 and ultimately became the team’s general manager who traded Sabathia to Milwaukee in 2008. Yet Toronto manager John Gibbons spoke enthusiastically Wednesday about the prospect of adding Sabathia’s vet- eran presence to a young Blue Jays rotation — and poaching him from an American League East rival. It’s hard to envision Sabathia actually relocating across the border. However, this offseason already has been Surprise Central. Hence the free advice here to the Yankees to make sure they don’t get too cute in defying expectations.
Cashman used aviation analogies Wednesday — “Right now we are circling the airport. We are waiting for clearance on the runway. … We have enough gas in the tank that we can keep circling for a while” — and it appears the Yankees have asked Sabathia to hang out in the terminal as they determine exactly how much money they can offer him on a one-year contract while filling their other needs (another starter via trade and either a second baseman or third baseman) and staying under the $197 million luxury-tax threshold.
They shouldn’t make Sabathia hold on too much longer. Not when he put up a 122 ERA+ in 148 2/3 regular-season innings in 2017 plus a 2.37 ERA in 19 innings over four postseason starts. Not when the Yankees have a new, wholly inexperienced manager in Aaron Boone — who was Sabathia’s teammate on the 2005-06 Indians, to boot — and a new superstar in Giancarlo Stanton, who will need all the help he can find to transition from the dungeon of life as a Marlin to the griddle of life as a Yankee.
After the Yankees signed Sabathia, Mark Teixeira and A.J. Burnett to mega-deals in the 2008-09 offseason, they lowballed free agent Andy Pettitte, getting him to return to a base salary of $5.5 million plus incentives worth $6.5 million in late January. Pettitte proceeded to play an integral role in the Yankees’ 2009 championship.
Would Sabathia hang out until late January for resolution? The Yankees shouldn’t test him. After working so hard and so intelligently to put together what they hope is an uber-team, the last thing the Yankees want to do is outsmart themselves.