Injury-riddled Yankees will need a little luck to weather storm

TORONTO — It can happen that quickly. One day, you’re breaking camp, you think you have most of your essential pieces intact, you’re ready for the season, ready for the grind, ready for all the pitfalls and pratfalls and potholes that can be waiting for you across 162 games … Only you’re never really ready. Not when it happens this quickly. Not when it seems that every time the Yankees take the field so far this year, they are doing so hoping to avoid various banana peels hid- den throughout the field, eager to trip them up, eager to sabotage this parade-perfect roster.

“It’s always about the next man up,” CC Sabathia said Saturday afternoon, after the Jays handed the Yankees their first loss of the season, 5-3. “It’s always about someone else getting an opportunity when they have to and making the most of it.” What’s tough is when that’s one of the guys who goes down, too. That was Billy McKinney. On Friday night, he’d stepped in for Aaron Hicks (placed on the disabled list with an intercostal injury) and he’d gotten his first major league hit in his first major league game, and it helped make him one of the feel-good stories of the young season so far …

… and then Saturday, two batters into the bottom of the first, he was flat on his back in left field. He’d crashed into the fence chasing a double off the bat of Josh Donaldson, and it was clear he’d hit his head, which was bad, but then he tried to throw the ball into the infield, and it was obvious something was really wrong.

The diagnosis: left AC sprain. That’s a DL stint.

“It’s pretty frustrating going into the clubhouse,” said McKinney, who was left in for one more hitter before seeing Brett Gardner trot in from the dugout, requiring his own long jog back. “I let the guys down, especially Brett, since he was supposed to have a day off.”

That was the plan, anyway, and it seemed a sound one, since asking Gardner and his 34-year-old legs to patrol the unfriendly artificial turf at Rogers Centre four days in a row felt like it was asking for trouble.

Of course, around the Yankees right now, there’s no such thing as

asking for it. So far, each day of the young season, trouble has found them without much effort. A few innings later it was Adam Warren, who took a rocket shot from Aledmys Diaz off his right ankle, tried to shake it off and tried to laugh it off but wound up limping off the mound.

So to recap: The Yankees broke camp with Greg Bird, Jacoby Ellsbury and Clint Frazier already on the DL. They lost Hicks on Opening Day. They lost Hicks’ replacement (McKinney) and a key cog in the bullpen (Warren, for at least a few days) on Day 3.

Good thing there’s only 159 more games to go.

“Good teams,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said, “adjust when they have to.”

But even good teams have their limits. The Yankees don’t have any more spare outfielders anywhere on their 40-man roster, which is why the man they called up to replace McKinney is Miguel Andujar.

Now, that may be splendid news for Yankees fans who were clamor- ing for Andujar to be with the club all along, but the fact is he’s an infielder. The Yankees already resemble an improv troupe in the outfield with Aaron Judge being given the start in center Saturday, with talk of handing Tyler Wade an outfielder’s glove.

Abbott and Costello had Why in left field and Because in center on their “Who’s on First?” team. The way things are going, the Yankees might need to trade for them by Monday’s home opener in order to field a full outfield.

None of the truly important guns has gone down, of course, the bombers at the top of the order are fine, and on Saturday, Tyler Austin crushed a couple of lasers that show the bottom of the order is eager to do its part, too. This isn’t the 2017 Mets just yet. The Yankees are still on a 108-win pace.

Of course, we didn’t realize the 2017 Mets were the 2017 Mets until this stuff started, kept happening and kept on happening. It can happen that quickly.