TORONTO — The part we can too easily overlook — and will too easily overlook, even in this column — is the human factor in the equation.

That is easily remedied, of course, because all you need to do is walk into a major league clubhouse, take a few steps, and you’re bound to run into someone who’s received, at one time or another, with one body part or another, the kind of news so devastating that it shakes you to your core.

The way Jordan Montgomery was, no doubt, shaken to his core when the most recent MRI came back with ominous news, when he was placed on Dr. Christopher Ahmad’s docket Thursday morning for Tommy John surgery. Almost everyone has a story about a busted knee or a balky back or a shoulder that popped one day, and all the tortured hours of rehab and recovery that followed.

“It’s frustrating,” Domingo German was saying Tuesday afternoon, “because the first thing you think about is that your career could be over. And you feel sad about that.”

German is a Tommy John survivor. He missed all of 2015 to the procedure and his career was very much thrown into peril as a result: the Yankees non-tendered him so they could remove him from the 40-man roster, then brought him back. He has pitched credibly as a stop-gap for Montgomery, but the first part of bringing the business side of the game back into this story is to state the obvious:

For now, he is more than a stop-gap.

For now, he is a permanent member of the Yankees’ rotation.

Next man up, and so forth.

“I need to continue to take advantage of this opportunity,” German said, solemnly, the empathy for a teammate etched all over him. “I need to help this team win some games.”

Said manager Aaron Boone about the current state of his starting rotation: “We feel good about the five we have.”

Left unsaid is what was abundantly clear anyway, and would have been even if Montgomery hadn’t started to feel poorly after a couple of sessions of throwing off flat ground, before slipping into the MRI tube: that five will be augmented sometime, somehow, by someone — Cole Hamels being the most obvious candidate.

The Yankees are the Yankees, after all, as Boone said, “It is a 24/7/365 situation for us, and [GM Brian Cashman] is always looking to put our organization in the greatest possible place.”

It is a chore that becomes a little trickier now. It was always going to be fascinating to watch Cashman — after a couple of years dipping his toe in the water of roster rebuilder — resume the far most comfortable position of trying to build a champion on the run.

It was going to be especially interesting given the fact that not only are teams not naturally inclined to simply help the Yankees along, but the Yankees haven’t exactly been bashful in promoting just how strong and deep their farm system has gotten, teeming with prospects that were always going to at least be starting elements in any trade talk.

But the price of poker just went up significantly.

And so did the degree of difficulty of Cashman’s job these next few weeks. German started his time as Montgomery’s stand-in with a bang, shutting out the Astros in emergency relief of Montgomery the night his elbow first flared, then throwing six no-hit innings at the Indians in his debut as a starter.

His results since have been up-and-down, but that’s beside the point, really. Even if Montgomery hadn’t gotten hurt, there was an expectation the Yankees’ rotation wasn’t a completed portrait. Now it’s just more obvious.

And now Cashman’s task becomes a little trickier. On the grander scale, of course, that challenge is nothing to the one that faces Jordan Montgomery across the next 12 to 15 months, but that’s life. That’s business. That’s baseball. It waits for no one.