Can Joe Torre be Casey Stengel? Fortunately for Torre, the answer doesn’t depend on his prying no. 37 off of the Monument Park wall, garbling his syntax until even an innocent question like “Who’s pitching tomorrow?” receives an “Alice in Wonderland” answer, telling humorous stories about how Babe Ruth hit one over his head, or stepping in front of a runaway cab on a rainy Boston night. Those qualities are all secondary to Stengel’s ability to take a banged-up club and guide it to a pennant in a close race with the Boston Red Sox.

Most of Stengel’s Yankees clubs were pretty deep, but his 1949 team, his first in the Bronx, saw the famous Charlie Keller-Joe DiMaggio-Tommy Henrich outfield broken up by injuries. Keller missed the whole season, DiMaggio half, and Henrich about a quarter. They had plenty of company in the infirmary as every star but Phil Rizzuto missed significant time. Stengel instead had to rely on players like Cliff Mapes, Dick Kryhoski, and Fenton Mole. There’s a reason that only the hard-core Yankees aficionados have heard of these guys. Stengel would have preferred to remain ignorant as well, but conditions forced him to spot these and other prospects and journeymen game by game, looking for advantageous matchups. The race went down to the final day of the season, with the Yankees beating the Red Sox in head-to-head play to capture the flag by one game.

With Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, Derek Jeter, and Jorge Posada healthy, Torre’s situation seems far less dire, but the season is just at the one-third mark and the injuries he must counter are more severe. Stengel eventually got DiMaggio back, but it seems unlikely that Torre will see Hideki Matsui or Gary Sheffield back in the lineup for any appreciable amount of time. Brief injury or illness time outs for Posada, Rodriguez, and Jeter have demonstrated just how close the Yankees are to the breaking point. The falloff from these players to Kelly Stinnett, Miguel Cairo, and Terrence Long is so large as to be unsustainable over the long term.

One of the new-age baseball terms that needs greater circulation in the mainstream is “replacement level.” You get a different technical definition of replacement level depending on who you talk to and the size of the pocket protector he carries, but the easiest definition is that replacement level refers to the cheapest available talent a ballclub can find, the kind of player who might be an acceptable Triple-A journeyman but would be pressed to play every day in the major leagues – the sort of player who, if a general manager saw them on the waiver wire, would receive an official evaluation of “Eh.”

When placed in the lineup, either through injury-inspired desperation or because someone in the front office somehow got it into their head that Tony Womack is a valuable add, these players can kill a club’s pennant aspirations. They simply don’t hit enough to make up for the outs that they use, and their negative contributions have a deleterious affect on the standings. If a player is so unproductive as to be below replacement level, that means that even that hypothetical Triple-A journeyman would be more productive. A club perpetuates a below-replacement level player at its own risk. It embraces the plague-carriers of baseball.

Major league players who qualify as below replacement level to this point in the 2006 season include Rondell White of the Twins, Vinny Castilla of the Padres, Yadier Molina of the Cardinals, and Travis Lee of the Devil Rays. The Kansas City Royals have three starters below replacement level and only one player – second baseman Mark Grudzielanek – who is significantly above it. Conversely, the historic, 114-game-winning Yankees of 1998 did not have a single player with significant playing time who was not well above replacement level.

Long, Cairo, Stinnett, Bubba Crosby, and Bernie Williams have been below replacement level so far this year. Despite showing some life in his bat of late, Williams qualifies because of a lack of patience and power at traditional power positions. The others can’t hit at all, and can’t reach the league averages with a stepladder.

The Yankees are already scraping the bottom of the barrel. It is only by virtue of better-than-anticipated performances from Melky Cabrera and, of late, Andy Phillips that the Yankees have been able to supplement the performance of the still-viable stars and keep the team’s runs per game average at a very healthy six-plus per. The next significant injury, though, should there be one – should Jeter’s bruised thumb keep him out for more than just a game or two or Posada’s back spasms flare up – the smoke and mirrors approach could finally give way to some serious zeroes on the scoreboard. The double figure runs total of last night’s Red Sox-Yankees game is not something that will continue.

To continue in this vein, Torre is going to have to embrace his inner Stengel to the extent that his inherent skepticism of the young and the unproven will have to give way to experimentation. On Sunday, Phillips wound up at third base after Jeter was forced to leave the game, but there is no reason that this couldn’t be planned to happen from time to time; Phillips played first, second, and third in the minors, and though he did not excel defensively at the more challenging positions, with a strikeout pitcher like Mike Mussina on the found and Jeter out, there is no reason that Torre couldn’t slide Rodriguez over to short and put Phillips at third.

This would allow the Yankees to play both Giambi and Phillips while slotting a superior bat in at either first base or designated hitter. Of course, they may not have that superior bat – realism about Williams, Long, and other nonproducers is as much a priority as is an embrace of the unknown.

Both the Yankees and the Red Sox have pitched better than they could have hoped given the deficiencies of both staffs, so the race for the AL East will likely be won by the bats. The Yankees have been lucky so far to survie so many injuries to so many central players, but now they have to figure out how to be good.

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