Tyler Kepner of the New York Times used the occasion of the New York Mets acquiring Joaquin Arias in Tuesday's trade of Jeff Francouer to remind New York Yankee fans how fortunate they are that Robinson Cano is still in pinstripes.

Here is part of Kepner's post.

In 2003, the year before the A-Rod trade, Arias hit .266 at low Class A Battle Creek in the Yankees’ farm system. He was one of five prospects the Yankees offered to Texas as the player to be named in the deal. Arias was 19 at the time, and a more polished defender than Cano, who was 21 and had just hit .277 between Class A Tampa and Class AA Trenton. The Rangers chose Arias.

"Thank God we never traded him," Gordon Blakeley, a special assistant to Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman, told The Times in 2008. "We liked him a lot and we didn’t want to give him away, but he wasn’t a ‘No, don’t trade him for any cost’ guy. If we felt we could get a Beltran or an A-Rod, he could have gone in a deal. We were fortunate."

As the old saying goes, sometimes the best trades are the ones you don't make.