Cash: Scout’s honor, Naehring has the

TAMPA — In a bygone baseball era, Gene Michael was famously known as a superscout, a role that gave him such influence with George Steinbrenner that nobody wielded more power in the Yankee organization. These days analytics are such a huge factor in the trading and signing of players that no scout, super or otherwise, will ever have such singular influence on personnel decisions again.

Yet in Tim Naehring the Yankees do have something of a latter-day version of Stick Michael. Brian Cashman relies on analytics perhaps as much as any GM in the game, but he won’t make a move to acquire a player without getting Naehring’s opinion.

“He’s a tremendous evaluator of talent,’’ Cashman says. “To be able to evaluate, it’s a special talent. All teams have a population of people doing it, but he’s in that select few who are really good at it.”

That alone makes the 50-year-old Naehring an intriguing figure in the Yankee organization. Perhaps best known in the industry as the scout who sold Cashman on trading for Didi Gregorius, he was promoted to VP of baseball operations when assistant GM Billy Eppler left to take the Angels’ GM job.

But what makes Naehring especially unique these days, at a time when front offices have largely become the province of Ivy League-educated numbers crunchers, is that he’s an ex-Major Leaguer — a former Red Sox player, of all things.

Naehring was no star, but he had some solid seasons in an eight-year career, and fell into his post-playing career mostly because an arm injury ended his days on the ballfield in 1997.

A chance meeting with then-Reds GM Jim Bowden at a charity function in Cincinnati, Naehring’s hometown, changed everything. Bowden convinced him to come on board in a scouting capacity, though he had an underlying motivation.

“He signed me to a minor-league player contract,’’ Naehring says. “I told him I’d done a year and a half of rehab on my arm, and I was done, but he was hoping I might change my mind.’’

Naehring scouted and then went on to work as director of minor league operations, but after seven years a new regime made sweeping changes in the Reds’ organization, leaving him unemployed. Soon enough, however, Eppler, then Cashman’s assistant, offered him a scouting job with the Yankees.

“Ten years later, here I am,’’ Naehring said with a laugh.

He had already become a trusted voice in the organization when Eppler left in December of 2015, but now Naehring has a more prominent role. The new Stick Michael? Cashman nodded. “It’s funny,’’ the Yankee GM said. “When Billy was up for the Angels’ job, Stick (who’s still in the organization as an adviser) knew how close we were and he said, ‘It’s going to be tough without Billy, what are you going to do?

“I said, ‘just you watch, Stick.’ I knew how good Tim was. He can do as much as he wants in this game. He could be a GM. He could be a manager, a hitting coach. He could do anything he wants.”

There was a time when many GMs were former big-leaguers, but at present there are only two, the A’s Billy Beane and the Mariners’ Jerry DiPoto. . Might Naehring be next for some team? “Nah,’’ he said. “Everybody always asks me that but I’m fine doing what I’m doing. I had my time in the sun as a player. I’ve been very lucky, to be able to play with the Red Sox, work with my hometown team in Cincinnati, and then move on to a premier franchise like the Yankees.

“I like just kind of like being a voice behind the scenes, help Cash and the front office put together a strong organization. This is a good place right now, with all the young kids.’’

Most importantly for the Yankees, Naehring’s scouting eye offers a balance to the analytics that drive so many decisions in this era. Not that the ex-player is some old-school dinosaur who ignores the numbers.

“A lot of people try to separate old-school baseball guys from analytics,’’ Naehring said “The bottom line is everybody has used information for a lot of years. The analytics have come a long way.

“To be a former player, or an older-school