According to NEWSDAY contributor Ken Davidoff, the Yankees are unlikely to make room for C.C. Sabathia if he decides not to return to Milwaukee next season. Even if that’s true, Davidoff writes that Sabathia might not be interested in the Yankees anyway because he has sites on playing in the NL and more specifically, on the west coast.
Let’s start with Sabathia. Two people familiar with his thinking assert that Sabathia, who will be 28 on July 21 and was born and still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has these two desires, as he approaches free agency:
1. He wants to be close to his home.
2. He wants to be in the National League, so he can hit. Sabathia crushed a home run in a June 21 game at Dodger Stadium.
The Dodgers, in fact, are said to be Sabathia’s first choice, which makes sense. The Giants, the NL team closest to Sabathia, are rebuilding, and they’re probably not anxious to dole out another mega-contract to a starting pitcher. They’ve still got 51/2 years to go on Barry Zito’s seven-year, $126-million deal — which, for what it’s worth, has become less of an issue lately now that Zito is pitching better.
Even though Zito’s contract hurt much worse, both the Giants and the Dodgers got burned on dud free agent pitchers. (Just two years ago the Dodgers signed Jason Schmidt to a three-year, $47 million contract and he’s barely taken the hill for them.)
But unless the Giants could get some team drunk enough to take that home-run-hanging-curve-ball-wizard Zito off their hands so they could make a run at Sabathia, the Dodgers do make a lot of sense.
