Don’t think of it as a massacre. Think of it as a plan coming together.

Confronted by a series of crises earlier this season, the Yankees reacted with uncharacteristic patience, but when the time came to make a move, they pounced. The Red Sox, confronting a season that might already have been fatally compromised by their off-season trial separation from Theo Epstein, were unable to pull the trigger on a parallel move. Over the last five games, the Red Sox reaped the rewards of their inaction.

The Yankees scored 49 runs in the five game series with Boston, something that didn’t seem likely as recently as last Thursday. Since the trading deadline, when they acquired Bobby Abreu and Craig Wilson and removed Andy Phillips’s petrified bat from the lineup, the Yankees had actually been scoring fewer runs than they had before. Through July 31 they averaged 5.6 runs a game. Between August 1 and Thursday, they had averaged 4.8 runs a game. Oddly, the Yankees were hitting well as a team during that time. All the hits and walks just hadn’t translated into many runs.

A good rule of thumb is that when there’s no reason for a situation to persist, it won’t. The Yankees had all the parts of a superior offense in place, one that in most regards was comparable to the one they lost when Hideki Matsui and Gary Sheffield went out with what were for all intents and purposes season-ending injuries.

Having struggled to score off of the Anaheim Angels’ staff, one of the best in the league, and the Orioles’ staff, one of the worst, the Yankee bats were just looking for a chance to gel. Despite a series of lineup compromises caused by the Boston series’ intense schedule, with a doubleheader and two day games after night games — there was more Nick Green in this series than even Nick Green’s mother could have asked for — the Yankees awoke against Boston’s soft bullpen.

Boston was so helpless to keep the Yankees off the board that they almost inspired the same feelings of sympathy that one would feel if he or she encountered a three-legged dog. Putting together a competitive bullpen is one of the toughest tasks faced by any front office, something we’ve seen demonstrated repeatedly over the years in New York with the Yankees in recent years (as in the short-lived Felix Heredia era, for example) and with the Mets, where the administration of Steve Phillips floundered on his inability to tell good reliever from bad.

This year we’ve seen a number of teams frantically trying to fix tortured relief staffs — the same staffs that seemed so promising back in April — with Reds general manager Wayne Krivsky leading the charge. Esteban Yan, Gary Majewski, Bill Bray, Eddie Guardado, Rheal Cormier, and others have been added to the Reds since the start of the season because relievers are so variable that it’s hard to know what to get. Many GM’s just go for a name that has something of a track record, hoping the mediocre known-name proves superior to the totally unknown.

Finding quality relievers is more art than science, and more blind luck than art. From year to year the list of top relievers in baseball has a turnover rate of 60%. Make a list of the 100 most valuable relief properties in baseball this year, then scratch out six of every ten. Chances are they won’t be on the list at this time next year.

Theo Epstein knows this as well as anyone, so it’s not surprising that he didn’t make a deadline deal of the type that his predecessor Lou Gorman did in 1990 when he shipped prospect Jeff Bagwell off to Houston for the middle reliever Larry Andersen. To inelegantly paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who would sacrifice their future for a little relief help often end up with neither relief nor a future. The Red Sox system is not deep, and Epstein is not going to cash in his few chips on a possible chimera.

If a GM believes that Wayne Krivsky’s methods are not going to help and could possibly hurt, he can’t make a flurry of trades just to create the illusion of activity. This is especially true of Boston, whose starting rotation is performing as badly as the bullpen. No mere patch is going to save the Red Sox, so there was no reason to mortgage the farm for half-measures.

Still, pragmatism isn’t totally satisfying when you’re watching your team being repeatedly blitzed in the middle and late innings. It’s easy to see Boston’s failure to construct a winning bullpen as a consequence of Epstein’s off-season Hamlet act — a distracting soap opera that may have prevented the team from properly sorting through its free agent and trading options.

Yet it may be that the Red Sox were simply defeated by the randomness of relievers. Some years you gamble on a battered spare part like Rudy Seanez and get a valuable reliever, as the Padres did last year. Other years, you get the guy who the Red Sox designated for assignment on Saturday.The difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox may be as thin as the difference between Scott Proctor ’05 and Proctor ’06, an advantage that no one can take credit for planning.

With a relatively stable pen and the knowledge that it would soon be reinforced by Octavio Dotel, Brian Cashman’s task was simpler than Epstein’s. He needed to add hitting and a starting pitcher, both of which are less random than relievers. With the path clear and two compliant Pennsylvania teams on speed dial, today Cashman looks as much the decisive leader as Epstein does the impotent equivocator. To Cashman’s credit, he correctly perceived his team’s problems, something that can’t be said of every man in his position.

The race isn’t officially over — the 1964 Phillies infamously played away a 6.5 game September lead — but the writing is on the wall for the Red Sox. It was an ending presaged by what the Yankees added, and what the Red Sox didn’t.

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