New York Yankees fans are bracing themselves for a potentially rocky season with all of the injuries their team has endured, but at least they have one thing to look forward to this summer.
On July 27, former Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, less than 200 miles from Yankee Stadium. He’ll join a long list of Yankee greats in the Hall, including former teammates Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.
Sabathia will be enshrined wearing a Yankees cap on his plaque after spending the last 11 seasons of his 19-year career with New York, where he won a World Series and made three All-Star teams. However, his journey to Cooperstown started with the Cleveland Guardians, where he spent the first seven and a half years of his career and won the 2007 AL Cy Young award.
The first-ballot Hall of Famer recently shared an emotional post on X about getting his career coming “full circle.” After wearing No. 52 as a player, he’s now a member of the Hall of Fame class of 2025.
Sabathia received the No. 52 during his first Major League spring training with the Guardians in 2000, when he was just 19 years old. Rookies usually get stuck with higher numbers because lower numbers are already taken by veterans and considered more desirable.
Desirable or not, that number belonged to him for the next two decades. The big left-hander made the most of it, wearing it for his entire career with Cleveland, New York and his brief stint with the Milwaukee Brewers.
In fact, Sabathia is the greatest No. 52 in MLB history. According to Baseball-Reference, he has nearly twice as many WAR (62.3) as any other Major Leaguer who wore the number for multiple seasons.
With Sabathia going into the Hall of Fame, it’s likely only a matter of time until the Yankees retire his number. They haven’t given anyone else No. 52 since his final game in 2019, and he’s easily the best player to wear the number in franchise history.
