Sabathia could benefit from Johan's record deal

Will C.C. Sabathia soon be packing his boxes for a permanent exit from Cleveland? AP

A fan has a right to panic. It's part of being a fan. You see your ace pitcher, or maybe your franchise slugger, slipping away to one of those big-spending big-market teams, and you know that your little squad, with its tightly controlled budget and unrelenting reliance on cheap, young players, can't do much about it. Maybe your team can't do anything about it at all.

So it's only natural to fret, to blame your team's fate on the screwed-up economics of the game, to shake your fist at the rich guys, to scream at baseball for being so terribly ... unfair.

Cleveland fans know the feeling. Cleveland fans are in the process of freaking out right now. The Indians' ace, reigning American League Cy Young winner C.C. Sabathia, is still a whole season away from free agency -- a season that, by all accounts, should be a pretty good one for both him and for the American League Central champion Indians -- and everybody around the country is already considering him as good as gone. Just a big ol' memory. Heck, he may not even last out this season.

For what it's worth to all those prematurely hyperventilating fans in Cleveland, it should be noted that Mark Shapiro is not freaking out. The Indians' general manager and his staff are still trying, against what look like ridiculously long odds, to convince their XXXL-sized lefty to sign another contract with the only big-league team that he's ever played for, the one that drafted him when he was just a 17-year-old XXL-sized kid.

The chances of the Indians actually talking Sabathia into giving up his free agency and re-signing with the Tribe? If you want odds, they're about the same as Roger Clemens planting a nice, sloppy kiss on Brian McNamee's forehead next week on Capitol Hill.

Still, Shapiro and his team are staying positive in their all-out bid to hang onto Sabathia. Right now, they don't have a lot of other choices.

"It's going to be a challenge," Shapiro admitted the other day, before pressing on with his half-full view. "I just think that C.C. wants to be here. We want him here. I think we'll get him signed at this point.

"But," he added, "I think it's going to take a stretch, on both sides."

This kind of dance has become a standard two-step around baseball these days. The Twins just went through it with their ace, Johan Santana, finally trading him to the Mets, who then signed him to a six-year, $137.5 million contract, the richest for a pitcher in baseball history. That's what started the Cleveland freak-out in the first place.

Next winter, the list of free-agent starting pitchers who could be on the move includes Derek Lowe, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, Brad Penny, Ben Sheets, A.J. Burnett, John Lackey and others. Now, no one on that list is probably as important to his team as Sabathia is to the Indians, or Santana was to the Twins. Still, it could get ugly for a lot of towns by this time next season.

Or maybe not. One front-office executive told me recently that the Santana situation is so different than most -- Santana is widely considered the best pitcher in baseball these days -- that any "trickle down" effect on other contracts might not be as bad as people envision. After 2001, remember, Mike Hampton's $121 million deal with the Rockies wasn't bettered until last year, when Barry Zito extracted $126 million from the Giants. There's an argument there that these mega-contracts for starters are a kind of cyclical thing.

Whether it's $121 million or $137 million, though, or any of the other recent contracts that might affect Sabathia's asking price, it's a good bet that the details of Santana's contract and any other pertinent ones have been slipped into the negotiating file of Scott Parker and Brian Peters, the agents for Sabathia. That's the mountain that faces Cleveland, and it's one that a lot of other teams will face if Cleveland loses out and Sabathia hits the open market next winter.

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