It’s a lot easier to say that it’s too early in the season to tell how things are going to play out than it is to heed that wise counsel. It may be true that six games are only six games, but when four of them are losses and two are wins, and when those wins and losses come in exactly the fashion a nervous Yankees fan might have worried about before the season, it’s easy to understand why that fan might fret that his team is destined to do poorly this year.

The basic problem, or so the theory goes, is that the Yankees are built to win only one way – by scoring lots and lots of runs. Put them in a pitching duel, or more generally in an environment where the ability to score or prevent one run will make the difference, and they’re helpless. Certainly, their incredible lineup can smash anybody – they’ve scored 25 runs in their two wins, 15 of them against former Cy Young winner Barry Zito on opening day and reigning Cy Young winner Bartolo Colon yesterday – but it’s an all-or-nothing approach.

The fear is that it’s going to be “nothing” often enough to leave them chasing the always-dangerous Red Sox and an improved Toronto squad, and pundits are already chastising the team for bad relief pitching and not being able to manufacture runs – but also for scoring too many runs in their victories. This is understandable in a way, since two of the four losses have been by one run, another was by three runs, and the fourth was tied going into the bottom of the eighth inning; how much good does the vaunted offense do if it works either to superfluity or hardly at all?

Fortunately for the Yankees, though, there’s no reason to get hysterical, and not just because they thumped Colon yesterday while holding the defending AL West champions to one run. As much of a truism as it is, you win ballgames by scoring more runs than the other team, and the Yankees are better equipped to do that than any other team in the game.

To put it a slightly different way – and the insight is not original to me – great teams, and even good ones, are less notable for winning the close games than they are for winning the blowouts. This seems a bit counterintuitive, as everyone likes to think of winning ballclubs as being distinguished by their heady play, solid fundamentals, winning spirit, and ability to thrive under pressure. There’s truth in that, but less than is usually made out.

Think of it this way: It’s perfectly common to see the Yankees or Red Sox running up a football score on some hapless opponent. How often do you see a really bad team like the Royals doing that? Not often; if they were capable of doing so regularly they wouldn’t be a really bad team.

One-run games, on the other hand, are largely decided by luck. Smart play, good managing, and relief pitching certainly help, but watch any one-run game and you’ll see a bad hop, a bad call, or a lucky break that could have gone the other way and led to a different result. Over time all of this tends to even out. Building a team to win one-run games, or managing it with that goal in mind, is building a house on a shaky foundation.

Last year, the Yankees scored 886 runs while playing their home games in a reasonably good pitchers’ park; in all, they probably had the best offense in baseball, just a hair better than Boston’s. In their 95 wins, the Yanks averaged 7.13 runs; in their 67 losses, 3.12. I suspect that if you figured these numbers for every team in the league you’d see a similar split. It’s not a problem for the Yanks to score lots of runs in their wins and few in their losses; that’s what every team does. It’s only a problem if there’s something inherent in their offense that would make them likely not to score a lot of runs very often.

The Yankees, of course, for all their problems, cannot be said to have this one. They have four MVP-caliber hitters in the lineup, and another four All-Star caliber ones behind them; that’s no guarantee of success, but it’s about as much bet-hedging as any team can do. That in six games against two of the four best pitching staffs in the league they only ran up laughable scores in two of them isn’t evidence that there’s something wrong with the team, and the fact that all of those games were winnable is, in fact, evidence that the team is sound and has as good a chance of winning as we thought they did a week ago.

Tomorrow the Yankees will begin a three-game set with the Kansas City Royals, the worst team in baseball and one with a reasonable shot of losing more games in a season than any team ever has. In all likelihood they’ll pound the snot out of the Royals, run up at least one of those football scores, and coast into a set with a fine Twins team that has a downright scary pitching staff and will make them look much worse. These are just the ups and downs of the season, and the Yankees are on the right course.

tmarchman@nysun.com