CC Sabathia wants you to slap a drink out of his hand. He wants you to know about his struggle because with stakes so high, he can’t afford to relapse. And so he’s repeatedly opening himself up to the world, in hopes that scrutiny will help his accountability.

The Yankees pitcher and recovering alcoholic wrote a Players’ Tribune post that was published Monday about how drinking to clear his anxiety spiraled out of control. He gave a peek inside his 29 days in rehab, where clear-headed thinking replaced alcohol as his way to cope.

While checked into the facility, Sabathia writes, he reflected on his father, who Sabathia learned had cancer and six weeks to live on the day he made his first All-Star team, in 2003. Corky Sabathia, who himself struggled with drug addiction, died when CC Sabathia was 23, which he says he never fully dealt with.

“It struck me that he dealt with his problem the way I did for so long: By trying to isolate himself so he could hide it,” Sabathia writes.

From rehab, the at-peace 35-year-old got clean with a fear he’d lose it. He admits that he could relapse, but knows the dangers because he knows how bad it got. If he needed any more inspiration, he got it from Lamar Odom, who was found unconscious at a Nevada brothel in mid-October, nearly dying from an overdose.

“I was in rehab when the news about Lamar Odom broke,” Sabathia said. “That really hit me hard. We’re about the same age, and both of us entered professional sports when we were really young. Watching how he struggled was terrible because we have so much in common. And it also made me confident that I’d really made the right decision.”

The decision had not been an easy one. He entered Joe Girardi’s office on the eve of the Yankees’ wild-card matchup with the Astros to tell the manager he couldn’t participate in the playoffs. He writes that he was scared, but more scared of drinking again than the public backlash.

“We’re with you. 100 percent,” Sabathia says the manager told him, a relief after years of drinking had spiraled out of control.

Alcohol was a crutch for the starter entering his 16th big league season. When he was feeling anxious, he would have a drink. As a rookie with Cleveland and feeling overwhelmed, alcohol, he felt at the time, helped ease his worries about fitting in with the clubhouse. Alcohol showed who the real CC Sabathia was, he believed, even if it was further obscuring the man he was.

A drink became drinks. A glass of wine became two bottles. Quitting became necessary and elusive.

“I never really wanted to stop drinking,” he writes. “So I would start going through cycles where I’d try to stop cold turkey while knowing in the back of my mind that I’d drink again eventually. It would always be two or three months sober, then a relapse. Three more weeks sober, then another relapse. I wasn’t getting better.”