George Steinbrenner, whatever else can be said of him, has retained the knack of timing well into old age.

Yesterday, in a statement, Steinbrenner gave a vote of confidence to the Yankees. After some bosh about it being early in the season, the Yankees’ 9–14 record being unacceptable, and so on, the statement read: “Brian Cashman, our general manager, Joe Torre, our manager, and our players all believe that they will turn this around quickly. I believe in them.”

It’s a good time to believe in them. With two weeks worth of games against the uninspiring and uninspired Mariners and Rangers starting tonight, it’s the ideal time to issue proclamations and decrees. The Yankees will probably pound their weak opponents into sand, and if they do so, Steinbrenner will look good for having professed his belief in his men just before they started winning. Managers use this trick often; the timing of fiery speeches tracks suspiciously well with the timing of ace pitchers making starts against bad teams. Most likely, in two weeks Yankeeland will be calm, and anyone inclined to give its king’s inspiring words credit will be able to do so.

The entire farce of votes of confidence and threats to Torre’s job security is in itself ridiculous. The Yankees have been bad because several pitchers have been injured at once, and this can be attributed to bad luck rather than picking the wrong pitchers or using them badly. No one is to blame for this, and everyone is aware that no one is to blame. The point of the ritual denunciations and promises to improve we’ve seen of late is to let the fans know that the supposed greatest franchise in sports does not take losing well and will go to such lengths as issuing press releases and planting gossip in the newspapers under the cover of anonymity to prove it.

Beneath the nonstory, though, is a very real story, which is that the Yankees are in the midst of a succession crisis and not handling it particularly well.

The art of running a baseball team is in balancing the needs of the present against the needs of the future. More than anything else, this is what really marks the Mets as a first-rate franchise right now. They’re presently the best team in the National League, and there’s no real reason to think they won’t be so in five years. Beyond Jose Reyes and David Wright, they have some electric prospects like Fernando Martinez and Carlos Gomez, a surprising stockpile of young pitching talent, a good young manager and a good young general manager who share a coherent philosophy, and an absence of burdensome contracts. Further, they have a new ballpark opening and Jeff Wilpon, a clear heir to the empire. There’s no structural weakness anywhere in the organization.

It’s perhaps unfair to compare the Yankees to the Mets in this regard, because the Mets are set up about as well as any team in baseball, but no one can have any real idea what the Yankees will look like in five years. The team certainly has young talent; from Chien-Ming Wang and Robinson Cano to Phil Hughes and Jose Tabata, we have a decent idea of who the cornerstone Yankees of 2012 should be. There is, though, no framework within which they fit.

Steinbrenner is, by all accounts, in poor shape. Bob Klapisch wrote in the Bergen Record that the 77-year-old is so badly off that “support staff had to disable his car at Legends Field to keep him from driving away.” General partner Steve Swindal, his designated successor, is currently divorcing his wife, who happens to be Steinbrenner’s daughter, and is thus generally viewed as now being the former designated successor.

The confluence of these two facts means that as much conflict as there usually is in baseball’s version of the Kremlin, we’re only seeing the beginnings of it. There are several varyingly plausible scenarios. An incapacitated Steinbrenner might outlive us all, operating heavily under the sway of a variety of Rasputin-like retainers. Steinbrenner might formally relinquish control of the team to unknown parties. He could die and his family could sell the team or give control of it to unknown parties, this year or 20 years from now. He could bequeath the team to the great city of New York, a gift for the people to enjoy in perpetuity. Who knows?

Naturally enough, these possibilities are going to leave various powers within the organization fighting to secure their own bases of power until the whole situation is resolved. Two years from now, the Dolans could own the Yankees, for all anyone knows. If I worked for the team and wanted to continue doing so, I’d be heaving as many bodies as possible in front of the oncoming train and pawning off as much blame on the next guy as I could. In this context, Torre looks an awful lot like a pawn, and so do Joe Girardi and Don Mattingly, his potential successors. Their stock has less to do with their performance than with the rising and falling fortunes and shifting calculations of their patrons within the organization’s hierarchy.

This kind of bureaucratic jockeying isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it doesn’t foster meritocracy, and it’s awful for stability — the two things you need to run a team that wins in the present while being set up well for the near future. The Yankees, in their periods of greatest instability, have been able to spend their way out of the problem, but between baseball’s luxury tax and increasing revenue parity brought on by the rise of new media, their cash advantage over the rest of the game is only going to shrink in years to come.

Steinbrenner (or whoever wrote yesterday’s statement) said, when not denouncing the Yankees’ play, “I am here to support them in any way to help them accomplish this turnaround.” I believe the man (or men). The single best thing the Boss (or whoever) can do now, though, is to publicly lay out a clear plan of succession and to make plain how power will be distributed in the months and years to come. Anything less, and baseball will be an afterthought in a Yankeeland consumed by schemes and intrigues — the one way to ensure that the world championship Steinbrenner so wants doesn’t end up in the Bronx.

tmarchman@nysun.com