MLB

GAMES OFF FIELD A LOT MORE FUN

CLEVELAND – The NL Championship Series was a coma-inducing yawner, the Rockies systematically spanking and schooling the Diamondbacks, mercifully ridding us of the most apathetic baseball fans west of Atlanta. The AL Championship Series hasn’t been much better, the Indians turning the Red Sox into a calcified, petrified batch of empty bats and tired arms.

So it was that one baseball executive, late Tuesday night, pacing in the press box at Jacobs Field and staring at the possibility of a sheath of empty, baseball-free days and nights linking the end of the championship series and the start of the World Series, had this to say, so far off the record he was practically standing in Halifax:

“Thank God for the Yankees,” he said. “At least they’re interesting.”

They are interesting, if indecisive. They are irrepressible, if irresolute. For a second straight day, the nothings going on in Tampa were far more intriguing than the somethings that have gone on in ballparks in Cleveland, Boston, Denver and Phoenix across the past few weeks.

For a second straight day, a manager whose team was eliminated more than a week-and-a-half ago, Joe Torre, is the center of far more conversations that Eric Wedge, Terry Francona or Clint Hurdle, the managers whose teams are all still very much in play for the Commissioner’s Trophy.

“We hold Joe Torre in the highest regard and obviously that’s why we are taking the time and this process is in place to decide what’s best moving forward,” said Brian Cashman, and I’m pretty sure the last time Torre heard news this wonderful it was from one of his ex-wives saying, “I love you. But here’s my lawyer’s phone number.”

The beauty about the Yankees now is what the beauty always has been: Even when they are busily not making news, they make more news than anyone in the sport, even the teams still, you know, playing. Even as they make no decisions about Torre, they enliven conversations all across baseball.

And even as nothing happens in the matter of the New York Yankees and Alex Emmanuel Rodriguez, things keep happening. It’s the closest thing to cold war we’ve seen since they started taking mallets and hammers to the Berlin Wall. On one side, you have an agent and a player huddling for three days, plotting strategies, engaged in “academic exercises” that amount to this: How much work in a gym does it take to properly balance $300 million in your hands?

On the other side, you have Cashman, in Tampa, saying this:

“I can reaffirm that if Alex Rodriguez opts out of his contract, then we will not participate in free agency.”

The poker being played between the two camps is so evolved, and the stakes are so high, they should be joined at the table, whenever they meet, by Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim Preston. No one asked Cashman to publicly take this hard-line stance, he’s volunteered all on his own. There’s no explanation for why he would do this then change his mind; this has to be the Yankees’ plan unless they plan to wear pie on their face in a few weeks.

And no one has ever asked if Scott Boras is serious about the things he says. There are never subtitles necessary with Boras. You can imagine him humming to himself the tune Veruca Salt sang in the original Willy Wonka movie:

“I want the works … I want the whole works … Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises … in all shapes and sizes … And now! Don’t care how, I want it NOW!”

Forget the World Series, which is about to be viewed by about 79 people nationwide. Someone should figure out how to televise the World Series of A-Rod Poker on YES Network, with those tiny little cameras attached to the Boras files and the Yankees files, so viewers at home can see what both sides are holding in the hole.

Right. As if Boras hasn’t thought of this already.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com