Big Love "cc!"

He didn't press Corky about the past—what had gone wrong with Margie, why he'd missed so much of his son's life. Now, CC thought. Now is good. "I felt like a kid again," he says. "I was excited just to have him around day to day. When I was a kid, we had a great relationship where I could talk to him about anything. I had missed that. And I got that back."

He and Amber were married in June 2003, and a month later, as CC was en route to his first All-Star Game, Margie called to say that Corky, on a visit back to Vallejo, had been found to have terminal stomach cancer. Amber was pregnant and due in September. Corky insisted that he'd live long enough to see his grandson born.

Corky lived through the summer and mustered the strength to fly to Cleveland in September, arriving exhausted and drawn. But he rallied enough to stand outside the delivery-room door and wait until he could come in to hold the newborn boy, Carsten Charles Sabathia III. Then Corky flew back to Vallejo and, that December, died at age 47.

CC didn't weep when he heard the news, maybe because he'd already seen his parents at peace. CC had given Corky a car and an apartment in Vallejo and had been willing to pay for hospice care for the final months, but Margie wouldn't hear of it: Three times a day she'd stop by Corky's place and change his bedding, make sure he took his painkillers and medications, keep him company as he lay dying. They never got a divorce. "This is my son's father," she'd say to people who couldn't understand. "I will love him regardless."

An urgency took hold of CC then, gaining further force the next spring when his uncle Aaron Berhel died of a heart attack at 53. Then in June 2004 Nathan, Aaron's 25-year-old son, the one who had played ball with CC while growing up and given him sunflower seeds before every at bat, severed an artery at a party in Vallejo—nobody ever found out how—and bled to death on the street. Sabathia viewed the body and pitched the next day and won. But for the rest of the 2004 season and into 2005, he would twitch in his bed the night before a start. He carried the dead with him to the mound. He wore a black rubber band on his wrist for his dad and had rip nb stitched into his glove. Never one to contain his emotions, he was ever more disturbed by marginal calls. He screamed into his glove, overthrew—and got pounded. "I'm going out there every single game," he says, "and pressing: I might throw a no-hitter today! I'm going to throw 100 mph! I'm doing this for Nathan, I'm doing this for my dad, I'm doing this for everybody. It was draining."

Finally, after five straight losses, Sabathia tinkered with his mechanics. He began throwing the cutter. And for the first time in a year, he gave himself permission to stop mourning.

"Something clicked, and I thought, I don't need to do this for them," Sabathia says. "They're up there watching? Let them enjoy it. Have fun and do what you do. They wouldn't want me to pitch each game for them; that's not even how our relationships worked. My whole attitude—everything—changed."

Sabathia finished that 2005 season by going 10--1 with a 2.24 ERA over the last eight weeks. He won 19 games and the Cy Young Award in 2007, and he won over Milwaukee and the rest of Baseball Nation in 2008. "Since that point?" says Mark Shapiro, the Cleveland G.M. "He's been the most dominant pitcher in the big leagues."

The crowd's cheers, a few decibels louder with each announced Yankee, roll over the lip of the stands. The pitcher stares down at his catcher. He holds up four fingers—four more pitches—as the Star Wars theme thunders and the announcer arrives at the main event.

"... And starting on the mound, number 52, CC Sa-bath-ia!"