How the Yankees found their savior

For now, it looks like a tweet that should have been heard ‘round the world -- or at least the world of Yankees fans, considering that it involves the best player they’ve got right now. But it wasn’t at the time. The Yankees were on their way to 100 wins and they were still chasing the Red Sox hard last August, so hardly anybody noted or long remember the news we got that day on Twitter from @BlueJaysPR:

“Minor league trade: Gio Urshela has been sent to the Yankees for cash considerations.”

That was that.

We have paid plenty of attention to everything that Yankees general manager Brian Cashman has done over the past few years -- reimagining his team on the fly, rebuilding his farm system and somehow doing that while the Red Sox began to spend the kind of money on baseball players that the Yankees used to. Cashman traded for Giancarlo Stanton and exciting kids like Gleyber Torres and Clint Frazier, and he even found a shortstop to replace the sainted Captain Jeter in Didi Gregorius. Cashman assembled a monster bullpen, full of big arms. And the Yanks took a big run at the Red Sox last season.

So nobody paid much attention to Urshela -- now 27, out of Cartagena, Colombia -- who, in a season when the Yankees tried to line up guys on the injured list the way they line up Old Timers on Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, has turned out to be more important and indispensable than anybody they have. Even the guy who knows everything on “Jeopardy” couldn’t have seen this coming.

Urshela became the third baseman on the Yankees after another exciting kid, Miguel Andujar, got hurt. And through Sunday’s game in St. Petersburg, as the Yankees were winning their series from the Rays and nearly getting into first place, Urshela was hitting .341 with two homers and 15 RBIs. He got another two RBIs on Sunday. Of course he did.

Last year, before the Yankees got him out of Toronto, Urshela had played 19 games for the Blue Jays and hit .233 with one home run and three RBIs. From small things, big things sometimes come. Not only has Urshela hit for the Yankees, he has gotten important hits in important moments and there really is no telling where the Yankees might be without him. No one thought he would matter this much when the Yankees left Spring Training. But then, no one knew that the Yankees would end up, at various times, with 16 players on the IL.

There have been other unlikely heroes in the American League so far. Michael Chavis, who had five RBIs for the Red Sox on Sunday as they were sweeping the Mariners and has injected life and pop into Boston’s batting order when it badly needed it, comes right to mind. But there has been no more unlikely hero in baseball so far than Urshela for the Yankees.

And understand: It’s not as if he just fell into Cashman’s lap. The GM had first tried to get him away from the Indians when the Indians had him. Could not. Liked his defense. “Elite defense” is the way Cashman talks about it these days. He finally got his chance last summer, and he got him away from the Blue Jays. But even after the season, Urshela didn’t make it onto the Yankees 40-man roster. He was still a Yankee, though. He went to Spring Training. And the elite defender began to open people’s eyes with the way he was hitting now.

Here is something Yankees manager Aaron Boone, once an unlikely pinstriped hero himself -- Game 7 against the Red Sox in the 2003 American League Championship Series, bottom of the 11th, off Tim Wakefield, one of the most famous October home runs ever hit at the old Yankee Stadium -- said about Urshela the other day:

“I remember in Spring Training just watching and thinking, I felt there was more in there with the bat.”

It turned out there was a whole lot more. Andujar got hurt. Urshela went to third base, and he started to hit (his batting average is currently the highest in the AL for players with at least 100 at-bats), and he hasn’t stopped. When Andujar came off the IL, Boone had to be as diplomatic as a candidate as he explained how lucky he was that he could DH Andujar, one of the star Baby Bombers of last season, and keep Urshela at third base.

Boone: “[How to use Urshela and Andujar] will continue to evolve. It’ll be fluid.”

So many of Cashman’s moves, really since the Trade Deadline in 2016, have set the Yankees up for the future. But of all of them, the deal for Urshela is the one that matters the most right now, because the only season that really matters to Yankee fans, especially after watching the Red Sox clinch the AL East at Yankee Stadium last year and then do the same in their AL Division Series against the Yankees, is the one their wounded team is playing right now.

The Yankees shouldn’t be as close to first place as they are after all the injuries they’ve had, to Stanton and Aaron Judge and Aaron Hicks and Luis Severino and Dellin Betances and everybody else. There have been other guys who have hit. But their best hitter and their biggest star has been Urshela, who grew up worshipping a soccer star, Cristiano Ronaldo, as a kid in Colombia, and dreaming of being one himself. Now he’s a baseball star in the spring of 2019 at Yankee Stadium. Obviously his manager recognizes an unlikely star like this when he sees one. Takes one to know one.