Trade for Gleyber has put Yankees back on dynastic course

Turn the clock back three years. To be specific, make it three years and five months.

At that time the Yankees were struggling along in fourth place in a very talented American League East. It didn’t seem likely that the team they had would be capable of the kind of late-season surge needed to qualify for the postseason.

According to reports there was a war raging in the front office. General manager Brian Cashman realized that the team had some players — two relief pitchers in particular — who could fetch some quality prospects. He saw this as an opportunity to enhance an already rich farm system.

Team president Randy Levine, known to be an elitist, disagreed. I don’t know if he puffed out his chest and harrumphed or not, but reports make it clear that he took the position that the New York Yankees should NEVER be sellers at the trade deadline.

We can only wonder where the Yankees would be today if Levine’s argument had prevailed. It’s unlikely they’d be leading their division by a comfortable margin and genuine threat to reach the World Series.

Fortunately for the Yankees, Cashman was cleared in 2016 to do whatever he thought best. He went to work and made a series of moves, some of which turned out to be minor or inconsequential. But one of them wasn’t.

On July 25, he dealt Aroldis Chapman, a relief pitcher who was in the final year of his contract, to the Chicago Cubs. To acquire Chapman the Cubs parted with four minor leaguers, one of whom was a 19-year-old Class A shortstop named Gleyber Torres.

The next part of the story is familiar to most baseball fans. Chapman helped the Cubs become World Champions for the first time in 108 years, then became a free agent and rejoined the Yankees. Meanwhile, Torres raced his way up the minor league ladder and reached the Yankees last year at the age of 21. As a rookie he played well enough to make the All-Star team and finished third in the voting for Rookie of the Year.

This year he made the AllStar team again and has become one of the faces of the franchise. He will probably end the season with 100 runs driven in and 100 runs scored. That’s star quality for any player but this one also happens to be a gifted middle infielder, capable of playing either shortstop or second base.

He’s doing all this at the age of 22 — an age most players are at the Class A level. He’s probably going to get even better — a frightening thought to any team that has to compete with the Yankees in the future.

If there’s a lesson to be learned it is that every team ought to let the baseball people make baseball decisions and let the bean counters count beans.

During the recent Little League World Series a Venezuelan youth received a great deal of media attention because of his highly unusual batting stance. He actually began in a crouch and straightened up as a pitch came his way.

The kid’s style is not quite as new as some people suggest.

During the 1950s the Phillies had a catcher named Stan Lopata who adopted a similar stance after taking a batting lesson from Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby. He used it effectively enough to make two AllStar teams.

Commissioner Rob Manfred recently put forth his plan for the imposition of a world draft. By “world” he means principally the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, although other Caribbean countries (except Cuba) would also be included. It would be completely separate from the existing draft and differ from that draft in several important ways:

The order of selections would not be based primarily on each team’s position in the standings. Instead, the first five positions would go to the five teams of a single division. The next five would go to another division, etc. The six divisions would rotate the order annually.

There would be no negotiations with players once they are selected. Each slot would carry a pre-determined bonus, approved by the Players Association, and the club making the selection would not be permitted to add or subtract from that figure.

Players as young as 16 could be drafted.

The draft picks, themselves, could be traded.

The last part, to me, is worrisome. I’m afraid the richest clubs would end up with more than their share of favorable selections. They’d acquire them in one-sided trades from small-market teams that don’t want to spend money on bonuses in the first place.