While fans zone-out on long-range strategies to land Bryce Harper, Yankees penny-pinching extends all the way to the bargain basement

Yesterday, the Atlanta Braves outbid the Retrieval Empire for a flea-market, spare-tire ex-Met named Carlos Torres, proving that when the Yankees go cheap, they go cheap from the top of the penthouse all the way down to the bodies in the bottom of the sinkhole.

This happened as River Ave, the pre-eminent Yankee interweb lug nut, fulminated at length on whether the top brass has committed the Empire to some secret Blofeld-level scheme to obtain Bryce Harper three years from now. This is the new parlor game for Yankee fans who see little hope for 2016.

The notion goes this way: Three years from now, Harper will be a free agent, so the secretly smart Yank brain trust is sitting on its cards, letting fat contracts die, so we can make Harper a $500 million Yankee. That's where the dream sequence ends, because it's hard to decide whether investing so much money into one player is a winning strategy. But - hey - when your team can't outbid the Atlanta Braves for Carlos Torres, you need something stronger than mouthwash to get through the slush of February. You need shoe polish, if not LSD.

Yesterday, Mike Axisa devoted about 1,200 words to the Harper "Endgame," eventually reaching one point: It's pointless. If the Yankees do have a secret Harper strategy, it will be irrelevant, if not incoherent, by 2019. In three years, Harper could be injured. Or a head case. Or a lifetime Nat. The most likely scenario: Washington trades him in his final year for a mountain of prospects that wrecks a team's farm system for a decade. He's being represented by Scott Boras. Do we need to think any more? Between now and then, there's a lot of bones to be put into the sinkhole.

So yesterday, the Yankees missed out on Carlos Torres. I won't pretend to care. The guy is 33, was ditched by the Mets, and got cuffed around pretty badly last year. He's no Justin Wilson. He might not even be Nick Rumbelow. If anything, it's sort of nice to think Cashman was even involved in a bidding party. The free agents still out there seem almost as pointless as pondering Harper, yet one could be the next Yangervis Solarte - the poster child for Cashman's scrap heaping.

We're a week away from the annual avalanche of crapola about players who have worked harder than ever before, found God, grown up, gone gluten free, whatever - the annual glut of gobbling. Bring it on. Anything beats this cheapo winter, when we couldn't even outbid the Braves.