It’s hard being a Cleveland Indians fan in central Texas, but it has its perks; I was able to get a Cliff Lee Rangers jersey for eight dollars off the discount rack at Academy Sports. According to a report from ESPN, my next adventure in “supporting great players who play near me but left my favorite team years ago” could be New York Yankees pitcher and former Cy Young award-winning Tribesman C.C. Sabathia.
The Texas Rangers, likely to lose starter C.J. Wilson to free agency over the winter, are preparing to make a strong bid to sign CC Sabathia if the New York Yankees ace chooses to exercise the opt-out clause in his contract, a baseball source told ESPNNewYork.com.
“I hear they’re going to throw a boatload of money at him,” said the source, who requested anonymity.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say the anonymous source was “a guy on the Internet who follows baseball”. It’d be great if it was A.J. Burnett, unfolding some grand Machiavellian plot to usurp the Opening Day starter position. Regardless, the source goes on to say “no but I think he’ll stay in New York”, but I didn’t put that in the blockquote because 1) it undermines the entire point of the story, so I don’t know why ESPN chose to include it and 2) I would really like C.C. Sabathia to pitch for the Rangers. Nolan Ryan loves workhorse pitchers, and when Sabathia pitched in Milwaukee he was a feedbag away from making that figure of speech literal.
Now all we need to do is bring back Cliff Lee, get Cleveland to unload Grady Sizemore for 20 dollars and some A-leaguers (extremely likely, if you follow the Tribe) and put something racist on the hats and we’ll be all set.