The players are dropping like flies in the American League East, with an All-Star team of players populating the disabled lists of the contenders. Imagine one of those Olympic swimming races that Michael Phelps has been dominating, except that halfway through the race, right after the kick-turn, all the swimmers sink. It’s been like that.

This afternoon, the Boston Red Sox put third baseman Mike Lowell on the disabled list with a strained right oblique muscle, joining nominal starting shortstop Julio Lugo, possible Hall of Famer Curt Schilling, and longtime knuckleballer Tim Wakefield. The current Red Sox lineup is a tribute to good planning and a willingness to improvise. J.D. Drew, who has spent most of his career batting third, fourth, or fifth, leads off. Kevin Youkilis, who seemed like a Mark Grace type of hitter just a year ago, is batting cleanup and playing his original position of third base. Sean Casey, a weak regular but a useful player in short bursts off the bench, slots in at first base. Shortstop Jed Lowrie is unproven defensively, but his bat is clearly superior to Lugo’s.

The back end of the starting rotation has been harder to patch, but recent arrival Paul Byrd is coming off a spate of starts in which he put up a 1.80 ERA. While the 37-year-old control specialist will likely revert to his normal, hittable form of the last few seasons, he gives the Sox a better chance of catching lightning in a bottle than does the perennial hope of the knuckleball enthusiasts, Charlie Zink.

The Tampa Bay Rays have been doing their tribute to the historic 1949 Yankees, an underdog team that suffered injury after injury on offense but won a close pennant race anyway because the pitching stayed healthy. The Rays’ offense was barely average to begin with, given disappointing seasons by almost everyone except rookie Evan Longoria. Now Longoria is on the disabled list with a fractured wrist, and All-Star left fielder Carl Crawford is probably out for the season with a sublaxation of his right middle finger tendon. Light-hitting shortstop Jason Bartlett isn’t healthy enough to play defense, so he’s been platooning at designated hitter with Cliff Floyd. Willy Aybar and Ben Zobrist now make up half the infield, and recent outfields have seen Eric Hinske, Justin Ruggiano, Gabe Gross, and Rocco Baldelli — the last of whom is attempting to play with an unusual mitochondrial disorder.

This is far, far from Murderer’s Row, but the Rays’ offense has continued to be good enough to support their pitching staff, scoring an average of six runs a game over its last 10 contests. A favorable stretch of schedule has helped — the pitching staffs of Detroit, Cleveland, and Seattle are a boon to a depleted attack, but there are no automatics in baseball, no guarantee that these Rays would hit.

Yesterday, Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner told the Associated Press he knew the reason for the Yankees’ disappointing season. “I think it’s very simple; we’ve been devastated by injuries,” he said. “No team I’ve ever seen in baseball has been decimated like this. It would kill any team. Imagine the Red Sox without [Josh] Beckett and [Jon] Lester. Pitching is 70% of the game. Chien-Ming Wang won 19 games two straight years. Chamberlain became the most dominating pitcher in baseball. You can’t lose two guys like that.”

Steinbrenner’s would have been a more satisfying answer if the Red Sox and Rays hadn’t been successfully coping with their own injuries. While Wang’s injury has certainly hurt (Chamberlain has been out, relatively speaking, about 15 seconds), the pitching staff has held its own in the second half of the season, allowing 4.5 runs a game, a better than average figure. The disappointing offense has been more of a problem. Though superficially effective during this period with an average of almost five runs a game, the totals have been swollen by a few lopsided wins. More significantly, in 39 second-half games, the Yankees have scored one or zero runs eight times, having been held down by some very good hurlers such as Oliver Perez, Lester, Roy Halladay, A.J. Burnett, Beckett, and Ervin Santana, but some lesser lights as well, such as Scott Feldman and Glen Perkins.

It’s not clear that there is any fault in this, blame that can be assigned to general manager Brian Cashman or manager Joe Girardi, except for minor things. The elephant in the room is a lax Yankees farm system, at least as far as positional replacements go, but Cashman doesn’t do the drafting. There have been many disappointing seasons on offense — Derek Jeter has gotten old, Melky Cabrera has gone backward, and Robinson Cano has perfected the art of hitting the ball up an imaginary chimney. What seemed like a solid bench was restructured but not improved. Overall, patience and power are down.

The injuries haven’t helped, of course, but if the co-chairman pretends that injuries are more than a contributory factor, then 2009 is going to be an even bigger disappointment — and he won’t even know why.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.