Till the End by CC Sabathia & Chris Smith

Author:CC Sabathia & Chris Smith [Sabathia, CC & Smith, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

I was sure I was going to the Dodgers when I became a free agent. The Yankees had other ideas.

11

Oh, I was playing for the Dodgers. No question. That was where I was going next. Because I was from Cali. Because L.A. was just far enough away from home. I wanted to play for one of the historic teams and have a chance to win all the time. In 2008 the Dodgers had won the National League West before losing in the League Championship Series to the Phillies (them again). The Dodgers had a great manager, Joe Torre, who owned four World Series rings. They had Russell Martin, Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier in the everyday lineup. What the Dodgers needed was an ace to go with Chad Billingsley, Hiroki Kuroda, and this twenty-one-year-old kid named Clayton Kershaw. Perfect setup for me. I was going to spend a couple of months over the off-season visiting all these other teams, go to the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas acting like I was shopping around and try to have the other teams drive up the price, then sign with the Dodgers. Hell, I would sign with the Dodgers even if the price didn’t go up very much, though I sure wasn’t telling them that.

When I got back to our house in Cleveland after the season, Cyia was still a newborn, so I was happy to focus my attention on her. We were packing up the house and getting ready to sell it, so there was a lot of chaos and uncertainty, but I’m thinking, Man, this is about to be so much fun. I’m about to be flying around to all these different cities and be offered all these contracts. Brian had put together a book with my statistics, comparing me to everyone else on the market and to comparable free agents in the past, with how much money they had signed for and why I was projected to be even better than them. We thought a contract for six or so years was a good target. But we really didn’t have a set number for that, or for the dollars I would accept.

Amber didn’t care where we signed, with one exception: She did not want to live in Vallejo, which at the time I still thought could work if I signed with the Giants. There was a small part of Amber that kind of wanted to return to Milwaukee, because those three months with the Brewers had been so much fun and the city would have been a safe, known choice. Otherwise, for Amber, it didn’t matter. We could have moved to fucking China as long as she and me and the kids were all together in the same place year-round. We were tired of moving around. Lil’ C would be starting kindergarten in the fall of 2009. So wherever we signed was where we were going to live.

I did have some other standards, if somehow I was forced to consider signing anywhere other than with the Dodgers.

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