The last time a single athlete carried a starting five as much as Masahiro Tanaka has the Yankees rotation was LeBron James with the 2006-07 Cavaliers.
A lottery team without James, Cleveland relied on LeBron to somehow get Daniel Gibson, Drew Gooden, Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Sasha Pavlovic to the NBA Finals.
So suddenly the Yankees face the baseball equivalent of becoming a lottery team. Because if Tanaka’s precious right arm is damaged beyond what the Yankees announced — a sore elbow — then their season is beyond repair.
The AL East might be flawed, but a Tanaka-less Yankees squad is not going to win it unless David Phelps morphs into David Price and Hiroki Kuroda starts Benjamin Button-ing it and aging in reverse.
On Wednesday — before George King III of The Post broke the news Tanaka was flying back to New York for an MRI on his right arm — an executive from another team was saying it was just natural Tanaka had to regress from here to the end of the season, due to the law of averages and the incredible weight being placed on him this year due to the team’s diminished rotation.
And the executive added, “The Yanks just are not a very good team on the days he doesn’t start, so what if something happens to him?”
Now, something has. Tanaka complained of elbow pain Tuesday after his worst start of the season, and was placed on the disabled list Wednesday.
The Yankees called Tanaka’s injury a sore elbow and did not immediately announce the results of his MRI. They will pray this is not structural and just an ache that comes from throwing so hard and so many splitters. With the All-Star break, the Yankees could get the righty back with minimal lost time. Anything worse, and you are dealing with defcon levels.
Tanaka’s significance only magnified with each rotation absence — Ivan Nova followed by Michael Pineda followed by CC Sabathia. The Yankees, without a starry reinforcement far better than Brandon McCarthy, were going to struggle to make the playoffs. That was with Tanaka.
Without him, they would have to think more seriously about becoming sellers at the trade deadline, because the trickle-down impact of a Tanaka absence would be overwhelming.
The best elements of the Yankees bullpen already have been overworked with Tanaka as one of the premier workhorses in the game. Consider Yankees starters have managed 33 outs after the seventh inning this year — and 25 are by Tanaka.
The Yankees’ remaining starters are Kuroda, who at 39 has lost consistent bite on his pitches; McCarthy, who against non-pitchers this year as a Diamondback had allowed a .314 batting average and an .845 OPS — and now is in a DH league; Phelps, a valuable swingman, but a swingman all the same; Shane Greene, who looked good in his first start, but — you know — has made one major league start; and Chase Whitley, who was just bounced from the rotation because his stuff was regressing.
Maybe this would be survivable if the Yankees had a top offense to ease the stress on the rotation. But they do not.
Instead, they were hanging in the AL East race because the division is down, their bullpen is excellent and Tanaka has been great. Now, Tanaka is gone, at least for the short run.
Remove Tanaka, and the Yankees are essentially the 2006-07 Cavaliers hoping Sasha Pavlovic can take over a game. Or, in their case, Greene or Whitley. Good luck with that.
The Yankees invested $175 million over seven years on Tanaka, hoping his youth (age 25) would outweigh all the pitches he already had delivered in Japan. But a few months into this great adventure, trouble has arisen.
And what lies in the balance in 2014, depending on Tanaka’s health, is if the Yanks will be haves or Cav nots.