For the Yankees, the only thing that mattered last night was the state of Orlando Hernandez’s right arm.

Saturday night’s game saw Kevin Brown, at one time the highest-paid player in baseball history, and Javier Vazquez, widely considered the most valuable pitcher on last year’s market, make excellent cases for the Yankees to go to a three-man rotation in the World Series. True, neither the Astros’ nor the Cardinals’ pitching staffs will be mistaken for the 1971 Baltimore Orioles, who sported four 20-game winners, but the Yankee offense can bail the starters out of only so many games in which they give up eight runs, take 153 pitches to get through 6 1/3 innings, or anything else of the sort.

So with the pennant assured, neither offense (there was little, which probably surprised Derek Lowe more than anyone else) nor defense (it was passable) nor even, in any real sense, victory mattered for the Yankees. It wasn’t so important for El Duque to continue his legacy of brilliant postseason work as it was for him to show himself capable of eating some innings in the World Series, keeping the team in the game and the ball out of the hands of Tanyon Sturtze and Esteban Loaiza.

It should surprise no one that he bettered that, dominating for four innings and ending up with a perfectly respectable line for a man with no velocity and little control over his pitches going up against an offensive juggernaut in their home park. For all the frustration-inducing indifference he is capable of showing in a meaningless late-season start, Duque seems capable of shutting down offenses, even those as good as Boston’s, at will so long as the stakes are high enough.

Like Mariano Rivera, he makes the extraordinary seem effortless. When watching him, fanciful tall tales about old Negro Leaguers who could strike out whole teams full of Hall of Famers on a bet seem credible: If you told their exploits to a fan who had never heard of either Rivera or Hernandez, would he believe you?

The secret to Hernandez’s success, the reason why, assuming reasonable health and motivation, he can do more or less what he would like on the mound, is that he’s exponentially more intelligent than most baseball players. Yet the principles of his unorthodox pitching style are those that guide all good pitchers, only amplified to a slightly absurd degree.

It’s a commonplace among coaches as early as Little League, that when a pitcher is in a jam, rather than pitch harder he should pitch slower. Watch any ballgame and you’ll see a pitcher with the physical talent to be a Hall of Famer who never figured this out. Hernandez takes it to its logical extreme, and so you have what you saw last night and will see against either Houston or St. Louis – hitters of MVP caliber like David Ortiz flailing at the eephus pitch, a sub-60 mph offering Hernandez likes to throw in fastball counts.

Trot Nixon got one pitch over the dead center of the plate in the fifth inning that slowed his bat so much it ended up golfed softly up the middle for a soft fly out. There was probably more chance of it bouncing in front of Bernie Williams than sailing into the stands.

The principle makes perfect sense. In today’s game, pitchers throw so hard on every pitch, and the lively ball and short fences have so much impact, that it is possible for batters to hit home runs on checked swings using the momentum of the pitched ball. Hernandez takes that momentum away, and makes the batter use his own strength to do what he will with the ball. Last night, it resulted in little but flares, checked swings, and rollers through the infield. When Ortiz hit a ball up the middle to take the lead in the fifth, following on a fielder’s choice, a bleeder, and a walk, it was the first ball with which a Red Sox batter had made true, solid contact all night.

It’s another commonplace that a good pitcher should, when possible, work backwards, using his breaking pitch to set up his fastball, throwing changeups on 3-1 counts and the like. Hernandez is one of the great disciples of this art of throwing the unexpected pitch at the unexpected time, and extends it as far as anyone. Most pitchers will follow a curve down and away with a fastball up and in; Hernandez is as likely as not to follow it by throwing several more unhittable curves to the same spot. The sight of the Boston hitters feebly swinging at these ludicrous pitches like hackers in the Coney Island batting cages offered good evidence that they should not, perhaps, have been so proud of being idiots this season.

This is just what the Yankees need. As good as the National League offenses are, neither of them produced the way the Red Sox did in the regular season, and if Hernandez can do what he did last night at Fenway, he can do it anywhere. Should Brown, Vazquez, Loaiza, or whomever else get whacked in St. Louis or Houston, El Duque will be there, whether or not he’s really physically capable of pitching, and using little more than his mind, will keep New York in the game. The score was an irrelevant formality last night, but you can count the game a success for the Yankees in the only area that mattered.