The story with the Yankees last year was the starting rotation. So it will be again in 2006. No one, save a few diagnosed hysterics, is worried about the offense; Jorge Posada, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield could all go down and the lineup would still rank comfortably among the best in the league. But with Carl Pavano already shut down with a cranky back and his compatriots still questionable for all the same reasons they were last year – generally either that they’re old, unproven, or not that good – the Yankees are not inspiring much confidence.

It’s easy to understand why. Last year was a disaster. Entering 2005, the Yanks sported a freshly reinforced rotation featuring a new ace in Randy Johnson and two young starters coming off “breakthrough” seasons in Pavano and Jaret Wright. Even rank pessimists like this writer didn’t foresee the miseries that descended on the Bronx, as 13 different pitchers started games, literally everyone got injured, and no one other than Johnson and Mike Mussina made more than 17 starts.Were it not for the deus ex machina that was Shawn Chacon and Aaron Small popping out of nowhere and pitching as well as Pavano and Wright were supposed to, the season would have been a catastrophe.

Since no one is expecting Chacon and Small to keep it up, and since there have been no additions to the starting corps, there would seem to be little hope for improvement and much opportunity for things to get worse. Such, anyway, is the logic, but I’m having a difficult time seeing it. Looking back on last season with a bit of distance, the Yankees’ starters weren’t really so bad as they seemed at the time, and looking ahead to this season, they actually look like they’ll be fine.

Last year, the team’s rotation pitched 965 1/3 innings and gave up 4.89 runs per nine innings, just a hair worse than the 4.76 mark for the league as a whole. Breaking that down a bit more,Johnson, Mussina, Small, Chacon, and Chien-Ming Wang (another penny from heaven) combined for 102 starts and 654 innings, in which they gave up 4.11 R/9. Everyone else, from Pavano to Tim Redding, combined for 60 starts, 311 1/3 innings, and 6.50 R/9.

It’s easy to look at that and conclude the Yankees lucked out, but they really didn’t. Johnson (who went 17-8 with a 3.79 ERA) wasn’t in Cy Young form, but he was one of the 10 best starters in the league.The whole point of paying dearly for an ace is that if you have one, the rest of the staff can be bad and you’ll still have a passable rotation.

Mussina (31-8, 4.41) did about what’s expected at this stage of his career.The Yanks were fortunate to get the kind of performance they did from the other three, but that was balanced out by Pavano, Wright, and Kevin Brown combining for 236 innings in which they allowed 7.02 R/9, far exceeding the worst possible predictions.

In all, the team’s main problem was the 14 starts soaked up by Redding, Al Leiter, Tanyon Sturtze, Scott Proctor, and Darrell May; the fearsome fivesome averaged less than five innings per start and gave up 51 runs in those games, an ugly 7.29 R/9. Had the Yankees gotten average performance in those games, the rotation’s R/9 as a whole would have been a bit better than the league mark.

Looking at this year’s rotation, there is the potential for this sort of thing to happen again, but it doesn’t seem too likely. Granting that statistical projection systems are like stock forecasting models – they seem to work on everything but what you care about – the front of the Yankees’ rotation looks fine. Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA projection system sees Johnson, Mussina, Wang, and Chacon combining for 127 starts, 728 innings, and 4.59 R/9. If anything,these projections seem a bit bearish – I’d take the under on Chacon and Wang giving up 5.34 runs per game between them – but that works all the better for our purposes.

Assuming these four do that or something similar, that leaves the Yanks 35 starts and around 240 innings for Pavano, Wright, and whichever pitcher they trade for this July. If whoever takes those innings gives up less than 6 R/9, the rotation will end up with the same league-average numbers it did last year – when the team, for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth,won 95 games and the AL East. (Keep in mind that none of this prognostication accounts for the novel new policy of having a center fielder, which will help the staff more than anything else the team could have done.)

Considering George Steinbrenner is shelling out about $65 million for this year’s rotation, mere adequacy doesn’t seem good enough, but in truth, it is. For a long time the Yankees dynasty was built on strong pitching and defense and a lineup that had its strengths but was on the whole just decent enough not to mess things up. (Think back to 2000 and 2001, when Paul O’Neill and Tino Martinez were still anchoring the middle of the lineup.) That’s changed; the Yanks are now built, as they have been for a while, around a staggeringly potent offense,one good enough that the pitchers just have to be passable for the team to win 90-100 games. It’s a low mark to hit, and even this crew can do it.

tmarchman@nysun.com