Why C.C. Sabathia just might help turn things around in the Bronx:
Sabathia represents a potential breath of fresh air in a stale, cliché-ridden Yankees clubhouse, one with little personality and even less passion, and no recent championships to compensate for those deficiencies.
Sabathia is a good-natured star who has strong feelings about issues and isn’t afraid to share them. This is an anomaly in a clubhouse famous for antiseptic professionalism.
(…)
The Yankees need more than a transfusion of talent — they get one of those every season. Sabathia’s greatest contribution to the Yankees may well be supplying that hard-to-define missing “something.”
He has been a hit with teammates everywhere he has gone, in Cleveland for seven-plus seasons and with Milwaukee for three months when he picked up the Brewers and carried them into the postseason.
If his tenures in Cleveland and Milwaukee are any indication, Sabathia could help decorporatize the Yankees’ clubhouse. He does things like calling up teammates on the road to go to lunch, inviting teammates out for dinner after a game.
(…)
The common wisdom is that a team can buy Gold Gloves, big bats and strong arms, but it can’t buy chemistry.
The Yankees may have finally figured out how to buy that, too.
If these pictures of Sabathia getting his first tour of the new Yankee Stadium are any indication, that may be true after all.
