Big Love "cc!"

He throws his last pitch and steps off the mound, and as he drapes a towel over his shoulder, the vague aura of loneliness that attends all pitchers dissolves. The 20 players and coaches who have been watching motionless straighten as one and crowd around Sabathia. He makes sure to bump fists with each one, leaning over to get the one guy crowded aside in the first rush, nodding all the while as if to say, Couldn't do it without you, guys.

Upon arriving in Tampa, Sabathia asked to have the locker of the impressionable Joba Chamberlain placed next to his. He spent at least one morning teaching Chamberlain how and when he throws his cutter. Nights, Sabathia made gestures such as joining fellow staffer Chien-Ming Wang at his first NBA game; days, he made sure pitchers bound for the minors were nearby as he talked shop with Phil Hughes and A.J. Burnett. One afternoon he stood pounding his fist into his glove, nodding and staring at a puzzled Andy Pettitte until, finally, Pettitte grinned and started nodding too.

Now Sabathia steps out of the bullpen, walking down the first base line. People rise out of their seats in a wave as he strides by, repeating his name, clapping, sitting down only when he's passed.

THINGS IN the Crest have steadily gotten worse since Mare Island went dark in 1996. There's hardly money for rent—never mind sports fees—and baseball is king no more. In March thieves broke into the North Vallejo Little League office, stole 150 uniforms and the concession food and candy, trashed the computers and trophies and tore down photos of alums like Sabathia. "It's not the same city," says Sabathia. "A lot of closed businesses, a lot of my friends out of work. I feel like there's something I should do ... but I don't know what."

He is, of course, in a unique position. Last May, in the face of a $16 million deficit, Vallejo became the largest municipality in California to declare bankruptcy. If Sabathia isn't worth more than the city he grew up in, he's at least running a surplus. Still, there seems to be little resentment of his good fortune in Vallejo, because Sabathia hasn't committed the cardinal sin of the pro athlete: He doesn't big-time his hometown. Each winter he's seen ducking into Vallejo High basketball games or working out with the school's baseball team. He walks in the annual Martin Luther King Day parade with his entourage: Amber, their three kids (CC, now 5; Jaeden, 3; and Cyia, six months) and Margie. Sabathia bought a batting cage for Vallejo High one year, paid to resurface the North Vallejo Little League fields another.

Once he signed his Yankees contract in December, Sabathia stepped it up. In February he asked to meet with Vallejo High athletic director Tami Madson and football coach Mike Wilson and his wife, school board member Hazel Wilson, and told them he wanted to supply the football, basketball and baseball teams with new uniforms—a gift Madson estimates at $100,000, more if footwear is included. Then Sabathia turned to Hazel and asked her to set up two college scholarships, Charlie Hustle awards in memory of his cousin Nathan.

With Margie serving as his local point person, Sabathia also pledged more than 400 backpacks, each filled with supplies, to the kids at his elementary school, Loma Vista, and is putting the finishing touches on a plan to overhaul his old Little League complex for next spring, complete with new scoreboards, dugouts and concession stands. Long-term? "I want to do a baseball academy, a Boys & Girls Club--type thing in north Vallejo, indoor fields: Have a bus pick up kids from each elementary school, have them come do homework for 90 minutes, then the rest is baseball," he says.

Last September, during a Brewers series with the Cubs, Sabathia flew Hobbs, his high school coach, into Chicago. He still considers Hobbs a second father, the man who, he says, "saved all of us" by teaching boys in the Crest not just to play baseball, which is the easy part, but also to love the work the game demands. Weekends, Hobbs would have CC and his buddies hustling from early morning until well past dark, and it didn't end there. He'd turn his car lights on the batting cage, burning out one or two batteries a season so the boys could keep hitting.

Hobbs's oldest son, Luke, grew up around CC and is severely autistic. In Chicago, Abe and CC talked baseball and reminisced about a trip they'd made to Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park when CC was 14. Sabathia casually asked him about a treatment machine called a "hug box" that has proved to be effective in calming autistic patients—and, at $5,000, costs more than Hobbs could afford.

"I got back from Chicago, and the machine was at my house," Hobbs says. "CC didn't mention it."