If they play for the rest of the year as they have until now, the Yankees will win 92 games. While that’s quite a way below the most optimistic predictions made in the spring, it’s also a fairly astonishing total for a team that essentially hasn’t had a pitching rotation in months.

Most of the credit for this must go to the offense, which has ranked alongside Boston’s as the best in the league. The pitching has been so bad, in fact, that I got to wondering where the offense that’s put the team on pace for 90+ wins ranks among those in team history. Was it in the top ten? The top five? Could it even be the best?

As it turns, it’s not the best, but it rates right up there. Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, Derek Jeter, Hideki Matsui, and Jason Giambi have made this a lineup to compare with all but two or three the Yankees have run out in the last 60 years.

The method I used to measure offense was fairly simple. I limited myself to post-integration teams, as much because the Ruth/Gehrig Yankees were playing a different game than Rodriguez or Mickey Mantle as because of the dubious worth of statistics run up in a segregated league. (Yes, I’m aware the American League of the 1950s was hardly the paragon of integrated baseball, but we have to draw a line somewhere.) I adjusted the runs totals of heavy-hitting Yankee teams for park effects (Yankee Stadium has always been a pitcher’s park) and divided that into the average number of runs scored per team in their leagues. By accounting for league and park effects, it’s possible to see, for instance, that the 2002 Yankees were actually every bit as good as the 1961 edition that set a long-standing home run record.

Viewed through this lens, the best modern Yankees offense was the 1956 model, which scored 5.56 runs per game in a league where the average was 4.66, in a park that depressed offense by about 3%. In total, the offense was around 23% better than average, a staggering figure that goes to show the value of star hitters. The lineup had several dead spots – Hank Bauer hit .241 with a .316 onbase average, the outfield platoon of Elston Howard and Joe Collins combined for a .312 OBA, and starters Billy Martin and Andy Carey sported OBAs of .310.

The lineup’s power resided entirely with Mantle (who won the Triple Crown in his greatest season), Yogi Berra, Moose Skowron, and Gil McDougald, not to mention deft platooning from the Old Professor, Casey Stengel. One wonders whether this year’s squad, which doesn’t feature a player as good as Mantle but has a broader depth of contributors, might have surpassed this team were Joe Torre a bit more crafty with the lineup card.

Of the next four best teams, three are the 1948-50 Yankees, which ranged from 17% to 20% above average, and one is the legendary 1998 team, at 20%. All four of these teams had one thing in common, which is that they featured solid on-base skills across the board. The 1948-50 squads simply didn’t have any hitters with significant playing time who got on base less than 35% of the time, with the sole exception being a young Berra, who was still decent; the same, of course, was true of the epically patient 1998 team.

After those teams come the 1961 and 2002 Yankees. The former team certainly would have surpassed the 1956 one had it not had three full-time players with on-base averages of .308 or below; the latter certainly would have done so had anyone been able to come up with a better pair of corner outfielders than Rondell White and Raul Mondesi.

Notwithstanding their flaws, these teams were 16% above average. After them, we find this year’s team, which comes in at 15% above average. Given the small differences involved here, it’s fair to say this year’s team is every bit as good as the 1961 or 2002 teams, and of course it’s built much the same way, with a tremendous core of talent offset to some degree by an inability to find really useful contributors at positions like first base and left field.

What you see here, I think, is the outcome of the Yankees’ longstanding, overwhelming focus on star talent, which has blinded the team to some degree to the difference between unspectacular but decent players and terrible ones. Matt Lawton is no great shakes, but had the Yankees picked up him or someone like him in early May, they’d probably be in first place right now; instead, the team spent most of the season pretending there is no difference between a Lawton-type and Tony Womack.

Given how old this problem is there might not be much to do about it, but toning down the insistence on making the Yankees a Broadway production rather than a baseball team might be a good place to start.