From Death's Doorstep To Immortality: CC Sabathia Joins The 3,000 Strikeout Club

3,000 career strikeouts for CC Sabathia. The 17th pitcher ever to do it. The 3rd left hander in baseball history. Just the second Yankee to ever do it, joining Phil Niekro. Incredible. Surreal stuff considering this man was hours away from dying in the offseason because of his heart condition. If he had gotten on that plane to London to help promote the Yankees-Red Sox series in the offseason he would not have come home. Insane shit. Now he’s started the season off pretty solid and was able to hit his career milestone tonight in front of his whole family.

I feel like with how innings are being limited by starters recently, and the popularity of bullpen usage, 3,000 punch outs might be a pretty hard number to reach moving forward.

CC will go down as one of the best Yankee pitchers I think ever, and will most certainly have 52 retired at some point. He’s also a sure fire Hall of Famer as far as I’m concerned. Now let’s send the big fella off with a ring.

P.S. John Ryan Murphy has had one wild career for being a pretty irrelevant baseball player.