According to legend, at least, after being poisoned, shot, and savagely beaten, Grigori Rasputin refused to die. His killers had to bind him and throw him in a river. You can imagine the terror they felt as they watched him drown, wondering what they’d do if this didn’t work.

The Yankees, by now, are well into the drowning part of their campaign. Yesterday’s loss to the Minnesota Twins left them 8.5 games out of first place and 5.5 games short of the wild card. Cool Standings, which assigns each team playoff odds based on a million simulations of the rest of the season, gives Joe Girardi’s men a 12.7% chance of making the playoffs. Baseball Prospectus, which does the same thing using a different methodology, gives them an even gloomier 7% chance. Having watched the Yankees come back from poisonings, shootings, and worse several times during the last few years, the rest of the American League surely cannot entirely believe that they’re going to actually sink under the waves this time. That is, though, just what they’re doing.

For a Yankees fan, or owner, this isn’t all bad news. Eventually, the team was going to miss the playoffs for the first time since 1993, and missing them because a lot of their best players got hurt is as painless a way to do so as possible. Also, unlike mad prophets, ballclubs get to try again the next year after being shot in the back and tossed into the icy depths. Hank Steinbrenner noted as much to the Associated Press yesterday. “We’ll do whatever we need to do,” he brayed. “Next year we’ll be extremely dangerous.”

The subtext here involves the team payroll, which will get a lot lighter once the year ends. Jason Giambi, Carl Pavano, Bobby Abreu, Andy Pettitte, and Mike Mussina are making $75 million between them this year. Other than $7 million due Giambi and Pavano as the price of declining team options on their contracts, the team owes them nothing for next year. Even in 2008, you can buy a lot with 75 million American dollars, plus the relative pocket change the team will get with others such as Pudge Rodriguez and LaTroy Hawkins coming off the books.

This is especially so since there will actually some decent players on the market this year. The prize is 28-year-old Milwaukee ace C.C. Sabathia, who’s on an utterly dominant run and could well become the best-paid pitcher in the game, but his co-ace Ben Sheets and Angels first baseman Mark Teixeira, among others, will also firmly ascend into the class that lights cigars and stuffs mattresses with greenbacks. Any — or, going by some fever dreams, all — could end up in the Bronx, making the Yankees invincible for another half-decade or more.

Sadly, this won’t happen. The numbers just don’t add up.

For next year, the Yankees already have $111 million committed to Jorge Posada, Robinson Cano, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, Mariano Rivera, and Jose Molina. Figure another $12 million for players eligible for arbitration or whose salary the team can set — Chien-Ming Wang, Joba Chamberlain, and Melky Cabrera, most prominently — and this leaves the team with $77 million to fill out the rest of the roster if they shell out about $200 million altogether, as they usually do.

As much money as that is, it has to replace a lot — no. 3 and no. 5 hitters, no. 2 and no. 3 starters, and a guy who once spent several months on the disabled list with a strained butt. Say the Yankees signed Sabathia for $25 million and Teixeira for $20 million. Say they also picked up Damaso Marte’s $6 million option and signed Chicago reliever Bob Howry or some equivalent pitcher for $6 million to help stabilize the young bullpen, and finagled Mussina into coming back for $11 million. That would leave the team short an outfielder, with no regular designated hitter, and just $8 million left to spend on the bench — none of which takes into account the chance that Jorge Posada may not be able to catch next year.

You can play these scenarios out any way you like, but any way you do it, you bump up against limits quickly. Signing Sabathia, Mussina, Abreu, Marte, Howry, and Frank Thomas, for instance, would fill all the holes, at least if you moved an outfielder to first base. It would also come to something like $72 million, leave nearly nothing for the bench or contingencies, and leave the team worse off than they are this year, given the effects of aging. There’s little reason to think the Yankees won’t be able to sign a star this winter — at least assuming the bankrupt finances of the state and city don’t lead to the kind of tax raises that would chase athletes off to tax havens such as Florida — but the bulk of their money and effort is going to have to go to just holding the line.

It should keep them invulnerable to knives, guns, and cyanide to scare the rest of the league, at least for another year.

tmarchman@nysun.com