It’s difficult not to feel sympathy for the bitter Yankees fan who, watching a World Series in which Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite, and Jose Contreras count among the most important players involved, rues and curses the ineptitude of the team that let them get away.

Clemens and Pettite were allowed to leave as free agents after the 2003 season; they promptly drove the Houston Astros into two postseasons and now the team’s first ever pennant. Contreras was traded to the White Sox last summer for Esteban Loaiza, who proved unimportant down the stretch and in the playoffs for the Yankees, while Contreras gained his confidence and turned into the dominant ace he’d been expected to be in New York.

Sympathy is not agreement. The Yankees have made plenty of petty, foolish, short-sighted, and stupid decisions over the last few years, but these are not among them. The test of whether a choice was correct isn’t whether it turns out in retrospect to have been wise, but whether a reasonable person, at the time the choice was made, would have made it. In all these cases, the answer is yes.

This is most obviously true in Clemens’s case. Since the Astros won their pennant, the sentiment, at least as I’ve heard it in the kind of bars where a copy of “The Baseball Encyclopedia” is kept on hand to settle disputes before they turn violent, is that Clemens is the one who got away, that he left because of sheer greed on the part of George Steinbrenner, who refused to pay him an exorbitant salary to not retire.

This may be so, but to believe it one has to think Clemens has been lying when he’s repeatedly said he would not under any circumstances have signed for the 2004 season with any team other than Houston or perhaps the Texas Rangers. Even granting that, how much were the Yankees supposed to offer him? In 2002, Clemens pitched 180 innings of league-average ball; in 2003, when he was 40,he was about 10% better than average, and pitched 211 2/3 innings.

Given the two Cy Young-caliber seasons he’s had since, it seems obvious that Steinbrenner should have offered him $20 million to pitch another season; it wasn’t so at the time.

If it isn’t equally obvious that not resigning Pettite was a wise move, that’s because it’s easy to get sentimental about Pettite, the spine of the Yankee pitching staff during the championship years. In 2003, he pitched 208 1/3 innings, and like Clemens posted an ERA about 10% better than average in them. The year before, he’d missed a third of the season with an arm injury that, rumor had it, never fully healed. The informed consensus opinion was that he was a pitch away from major injury. That opinion was nearly confirmed last season when he missed over half the season with a bad elbow, and wasn’t all that effective when he did pitch.

Even had there been no health issues, no one could have seen this year coming. Pettite’s 2.39 ERA in 222 1/3 regular season innings and brilliant stretch drive made him arguably the best pitcher in the league, not only far more than anyone could have expected from him after 2003, but far better than he’d ever given any hint he was capable of.

The best the Yankees could reasonably have expected after 2003 was a couple of seasons of 4.00 ERA, 220 innings ball – valuable, but not irreplaceable. Given the team’s over commitment to other homegrown stars like Bernie Williams, it was, if anything, refreshing to see them make the hard choice and let Pettite go.

Finally there’s Contreras, whom the Yankees didn’t treat well – when, under difficult circumstances, he proved to not be an ace pitcher in a bottle, they simply discarded him, branding him soft and a failure. This was a shabby thing to do, but also understandable.

The Hernandez brothers – Orlando and Livan – and Contreras are the only Cuban pitchers in recent memory to develop into top-flight stars; balanced against that are the relative failures of the over hyped likes of Osvaldo Fernandez, Rolando Arrojo, Ariel Prieto, etc. Contreras was a totally different pitcher in the Bronx than he has been in Bridgeport, tentative and hesitant even to establish his fastball. Might the Yankees have exercised more patience? Of course. But the fans now castigating the organization are the same ones who wanted Contreras tarred and feathered on his way out of town for his failures against the hated Red Sox.

Players aren’t, as those of us who like to use numbers to back our arguments are often reminded, just numbers on a page. They respond differently in different circumstances. There’s no guarantee that had the Yankees held onto all three of these pitchers they would even have been effective, let alone dominant, and there was reason to think when they parted ways with them that they would be worse for other teams than they had been for the Yankees. The team deserves most of the guff it gets; this is one time it doesn’t.

tmarchman@nysun.com