Big Love "cc!"

The pitcher emerges from the dugout and steps over the first base line, onto the playing field. It is 7:16 p.m. A Tigers journeyman named Ryan Raburn is standing in the batter's box. And this is how it begins, on a cool night in Tampa: The same way it always begins. The crowd quiets. The catcher waits. The pitcher draws up his right leg, windmills his left arm and opens his hand.

ALL HIS life he's been preparing for New York. People don't understand that about CC Sabathia; he didn't really know it about himself. But Hobbs always told him that he wouldn't be truly great until he settled into being a father and a pro, until his circumstances matched his preternatural maturity, and in Chicago last season Hobbs surveyed the whole package—the wife and two kids, a third on the way, the decade of pro experience, the coming huge contract and its attendant pressures—and told CC, "I've been waiting for this time for you."

Still, during his dazzling run with the Brewers, Sabathia didn't realize that he was, in fact, competing himself into a corner. He had never played for the contract. Milwaukee felt as comfy as a favorite chair, but as the free-agent derby unwound, the Angels were the club Cashman feared most. In December the Angels offered Sabathia a five-year deal for $20 million per, but their ham-handed 24-hour deadline put him off. And something else kept nagging at him.

Now that the 2008 season had proved that CC Sabathia played to win, he couldn't get around the idea that he had no choice. This, he insists, is the thought that kept rattling in his head: If I want to win more than I want to be home, how can I not go to New York?

"I couldn't answer that question," he says. "[The Yankees] got the best players, and they're committed; they always get what they need. If you really want to win, why wouldn't you come here? And once I couldn't answer that...."

Maybe Hobbs is right. Sabathia says he's not a bit worried about New York and its expectations; what is that, really, compared to facing a gun or a dying man's hospital room? "Three years ago? Maybe not," he says. "Today? I'm ready."

For everything. Carry the Yankees into a new era, start the first game in the new stadium, change a clubhouse culture, win a championship? O.K. Give the kids in his hometown a hand up? Sure. Adopt two AIDS orphans, because who better than someone who's experienced the same horror and loneliness? That's the plan. Anything else? Bring it. The kid wrote it once, but he's serious now. Big as you got.