After getting shelled by the Tigers in Game 4 of the 2012 ALCS in Detroit, tiny voices in CC Sabathia’s head screamed he needed help for a drinking problem. He tuned them out.

This past Oct. 4, after a bender that turned a weekend in Baltimore into a 48-hour stretch in which the large lefty’s mind went blank, Sabathia finally understood he was an alcoholic in desperate need of immediate help.

That was a Sunday, and the Yankees were completing the regular season and preparing to host the Astros at Yankee Stadium two days later in the AL wild-card game.

Sabathia walked into the Camden Yards visiting manager’s office and told Joe Girardi, trainer Steve Donohue, pitching coach Larry Rothschild and director of mental conditioning Chad Bohling he was leaving the team and headed for help at Silver Hill, a Connecticut alcohol rehabilitation center.

Always accountable for his performance and the lone Yankees starter with postseason experience, Sabathia knew he was abandoning his teammates. Sabathia wasn’t going to face the Astros, but he would have been part of the Yankees’ ALDS rotation had they advanced. Still, the game was no longer about 60 feet, 6 inches, 24 teammates, coaches and fans. The 35-year-old decided to take care of himself.

“I can’t do this anymore,’’ Sabathia remembers telling himself that Sunday morning. “The timing was horrible, but I felt like a big weight off my shoulder by telling somebody and letting the team know.’’

Sabathia said he started drinking after Friday night’s game against the Orioles was rained out. He refuted a report that he was drinking at the ballpark Friday and Saturday but admitted, “I was probably still drunk from the night before, hung over.’’

Sabathia’s wife, Amber, said: “He doesn’t really remember that weekend.’’

After the meeting in Girardi’s office, Sabathia talked to Amber. He left before the game, and was driven to the family’s Bergen County home. He checked into Silver Hill the next day.

Sabathia grew up in Vallejo, Calif., where he was exposed to the blights of the inner city. He has pitched in a World Series and for 15 years in the big leagues. Nothing, he says, compares to what he felt walking into Silver Hill.

“That day was probably the most humbling, humiliating and scariest day of my life. Right now it’s turning into the proudest day in my life, kind of standing up and getting some help,’’ Sabathia said recently in an expansive interview inside a Roc Nation conference room high over Broadway. “The first five days I was ready to come home, but I am glad I stuck it out and I got a lot out of it.’’

The Baltimore binge was so bad, Sabathia’s 6-foot-7, 325-pound body soaked in so much booze, he had to be detoxed before beginning therapy. “It’s not good,” he explained. “I was [in detox] a day and a half.’’

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Sabathia knew in 2012 the problem was serious. Still, until last month, he opted to tackle it without help.

“I guess I can go back and say at the end of 2012, I kind of realized I had a problem with drinking, kind of admitted I was alcoholic,” Sabathia said. “In between that three-year span, I would put two to three months together of being sober. But I would get on the road, and when nobody was looking, I would isolate myself and start drinking. It was binge drinking on the weekend. It was the same kind of thing that happened in Baltimore on that weekend.”

Amber Sabathia mentioned a vacation from 2012 in recalling the early stages of CC’s problematic drinking.

“Three years ago, CC was willing to stop for his family, for his kids, for his marriage. He said he was willing to stop drinking, but he never admitted he had a problem or admitted he really needed to stop,” Amber said. “Three years ago, he was doing, ‘Oh, I am just going to have wine.’ Or we went on vacation and he said, ‘I am just going to have beer with dinner.’’’

CC said: “After that, I went on a little bit of a binge and tried to seek out help, therapy, didn’t go to a rehab. I hadn’t considered that. I figured I could get control of it.’’

Amber Sabathia said her husband had three binges in the past calendar year. Further proof he was an alcoholic came to Sabathia when he started to make plans for drinking when he wasn’t pitching.

“I would go around my starts,’’ Sabathia said. “I was planning out when I could drink. If you got to do that, you got a problem.’’

According to Sabathia, his Yankees teammates knew he was a drinker, but were in the dark as to the depth of the problem because he did the heavy drinking alone in a hotel room late at night. It didn’t even matter what kind of booze it was.

“I’m sure they knew I drank a lot, but I don’t think they realized how bad it would get. When I got to the hotel room, I continued to drink by myself, always by myself,’’ Sabathia said. “I think what was weird for everybody was that I wouldn’t drink for a long time [in between binges]. I would go to different concerts, different events and smoke cigars, but it was a shock to most people.’’

Even when the booze left him hurting, Sabathia never missed a workout, a scouting-report meeting or a game.

“There wasn’t times I couldn’t pitch. I was like functioning as an alcoholic,” Sabathia said. “It was tough. I would always come to the field and sweat it out. I would always get my work in. It was weird.

“I hid it pretty good, nobody called me in and said, ‘Hey, you aren’t doing your work in between starts. You aren’t doing this, you aren’t doing that.’ I just hid it and [would] be walking around hung over and sick and still going through the motions.’’

In the wee hours of this past Aug. 15, Sabathia was involved in a heated verbal exchange — fueled by booze — with a group of hecklers outside a Toronto nightclub.

“If I was sober, it wouldn’t have happened,’’ said Sabathia, who was restrained before the situation got physical.

However, it did plant the seed that rehab was needed.

“That type of stuff, that could happen any time if I am not sober,’’ Sabathia said. “At the time, I felt I needed [rehab], but it was right in the middle of the season. I was out with some guys. I wasn’t obliterated or blasted, but I wasn’t sober. It was also a sign I needed to do what I needed to do.’’

Amber had suggested Sabathia wait until after the wild-card game to enter rehab. Or, if the Yankees advanced, wait until the season was over and go to Silver Hill in November. That way, nobody would likely know.

“If I did that, I would have been hiding. I would have been in rehab the whole time worrying about who knows. I was tired of being in the dark about it,” Sabathia said. “Like I said, I had been dealing with it since 2012. It was exhausting. That was more exhausting than actually drinking, trying to hide the drinking. I really didn’t care how it came out. I called Ron [Berkowitz, his p.r. guru] and said, ‘You guys figure it out how we play it, but I am leaving.’ It was something that I was absolute about.’’

Sabathia, who took his first drink at the age of 14, said this was his first stab at rehab and the problem was solely alcohol. “I grew up around enough drugs that I know not to touch them,’’ he said, referring to his father’s battle with drug addiction.

Sabathia arrived at Silver Hill on Oct. 5 and left Oct. 30. In between, he made two trips home to watch his son CC play football and to spend time with his three other children — son Carter and daughters Jayden and Cyia — and Amber.

Sabathia was frank with little CC, his 12-year-old son.

“He understands what I am going through. We talked about my father and his [drug] struggles and going through rehab and me just trying to break the cycle and be better for him,’’ said Sabathia, who didn’t use the same approach with the three other children because they are 10, 7 and 5. “It was actually a good conversation we had. I think he gets it. He’s a smart kid.’’

On his first full day at Silver Hill, it dawned on Sabathia he was going to watch the Astros-Yankees game from a rehab facility instead of the first-base dugout rail at Yankee Stadium.

“I asked CC, ‘Are you going to watch the game?'” Amber said. “And he said, ‘Being here right now is the best way I can support my team. That’s the best thing I can do for them right now, just taking care of me.’”

(That mindset didn’t keep Sabathia from being cranky about umpire Eric Cooper’s work at home plate during the 3-0 Astros win: “I was yelling at the TV, hollering, the strike zone was very tough for us,” Sabathia said. “I thought [Masahiro] Tanaka threw some good pitches, but it is what it is.’’)

What Sabathia saw at Silver Hill underscored what type of life he has carved out.

“Some people have different bottoms, some people fall all the way off where they lose their families, their house and everything,’’ Sabathia said. “It kind of made me appreciate what I still have and what I can have in the future, staying sober. … [I learned] that I’m not depressed, I don’t have anxiety and that I’m in a pretty good place. I don’t need to pick up alcohol.”

Those in the addiction field believe a rehab stay is simply the start of staying sober. One must have a support system in place.

“I have a sponsor — I’m not going to say his name. I have a good support system. I have things in place I will be doing,” Sabathia said. “I feel good about it. I read [Dwight Gooden’s comments in The Post], and he was talking about being around his family at the holidays [where alcohol was available], and I am actually looking forward to that because that was never something I had a problem with.’’

Talk to enough people who have battled addictions and you hear about triggers. It could be a city, a hotel, a favorite restaurant or anything that sparks the urge to take a drink.

Because Sabathia’s penchant was to lock himself in a hotel room and drain the mini-bar, baseball and its never-ending travel will be a large trigger.

“I am sure baseball will be [a trigger], and that’s another reason I didn’t want to hide this because if people see my behavior changing, they can call me out and ask me what’s going on,” Sabathia said. “It’s not a secret.’’

Like the aging pitcher he is who needs something different to get hitters out, Sabathia says he is more equipped to turn back the demons that check into the hotel with him.

“That’s always going to be tough, it’s going to be hard,’’ Sabathia said of the road trips. “I have different things I can do now, pick up a book, play some video games, go out with my teammates. Do stuff that I like to do and get back to my old self and not isolate. The biggest thing for me is to not isolate myself, feeling like I need something to do. … I’m only 30 days out, but I feel like I’m putting this behind me.’’

Spring training isn’t the regular season, but it’s baseball and an environment rife with opportunities to end a warm March day in Tampa with a drink or 12. People in recovery often hear they have to change the people they associate with and stop going out. That’s not going to be part of Sabathia’s program.

“My problem is me. It’s not that I can’t ask anybody to not drink around me. That’s never been a temptation to me. It was always by myself, isolated, doing those things,’’ Sabathia said. “My environment is going to be the same for the most part. So if people see me out, don’t assume I am [relapsing].’’

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The rehab stint led to a bevy of cancellations for CC and Amber’s charitable foundation. The couple was adamant that the kickoff event Friday night for “PitCCh In’’ would go on as scheduled.

“The one thing he said is: The foundation, that we can’t stop, that we are positive role models,” Amber said. “I said, ‘You just got out of rehab, how can you be a positive role model?’ He said, ‘Amber, the kids that we service are inner-city youth just like us, and we both grew up with alcoholism.’’’

Sabathia described the support he has gotten from the Yankees as “amazing.’’

“I talked to [Chris Young]. I talked to Dellin [Betances]. I talked to Jeet [Derek Jeter], Andy [Pettitte] and Mo [Mariano Rivera], Alex [Rodriguez] and Prince [Fielder] — all the guys I am close with. Brett [Gardner] called me,’’ said Sabathia, mentioning Girardi and GM Brian Cashman have checked in as well.

Sabathia begins offseason conditioning Monday and will throw a football until late January, when a throwing program begins.

“I’m looking forward to it just knowing that I have the tools in place to keep me sober. I’m looking forward to getting back on the field and pitching well,” Sabathia said. “I feel I found something with the [knee] brace, and it allowed me to pitch, my last three or four starts, I pitched pretty good. Hopefully I can carry that over to next season and help the team.’’

Asked how he will handle the verbal abuse he hears when warming up in the bullpen, Sabathia had a very real answer.

“I’ll be fine. I have heard worse (stuff) before. It is what it is,” he said. “They call me fat and call me an alcoholic. Whatever. I am.’’