Unless you’re counting their race to beat out Toronto for fourth place, the Yankees’ season is over. For the first time in his career, Derek Jeter will have to sit at home this October; for the first time since 1994, Yankee accountants won’t have to figure out where to stack up millions of dollars in playoff revenue. And an entire generation of New York fans too young to remember the days of Neon Deion and “Bam-Bam” Meulens is about to learn just how dead a truly meaningless September ballgame can be.

This isn’t entirely bad. We are, for one thing, guaranteed at least one spectacularly entertaining screed from Hank Steinbrenner during the next few weeks. But more importantly, getting knocked out of the race so early could, in the long run, be of enormous benefit to the Yankees as an actual baseball team.

The first and most important reason for this is named Joba Chamberlain, who will be activated from the disabled list today. For nearly any other team in baseball – and yes, yes, the Yankees aren’t just any team – the fact that he proved this summer to be just as effective a starter as he was a reliever would, alone, make this season a success. San Francisco, for instance, has had a terrible year, but Tim Lincecum’s emergence as perhaps the best starter in the National League has redeemed it. With a serious playoff run out of the question, the Yankees now have no incentive to push the injured Chamberlain at all, and can even shut him down just to be safe.

You just have to look at Mark Prior’s career to see what can happen when a young pitcher of limitless gifts is overworked late in the year in the name of winning a pennant, and you just have to look at Chicago’s records between 2004 and 2006 to see what can happen when a team ruins such a pitcher. Anything that keeps a stiff-shouldered Chamberlain from tossing curveballs to Evan Longoria or Mark Teixeira on cold nights in mid-October, including a third-place finish, has its virtue.

The absence of playoff hopes means there’s no reason for Chamberlain to pitch too much, but also, in turn, means there’s no reason for Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy not to pitch. Yankees brass turned to the truly legendary Carl Pavano to start a crucial game a week ago rather than Hughes, which says a lot about how much they trusted the former phenom when it counted, but that doesn’t much matter now. At this point, there’s no reason at all for Pavano or Sidney Ponson to start a game for the rest of the year; Hughes and Kennedy can give up dozens of runs per start and it just won’t matter. This is as low-pressure an environment as these two will likely ever see in the Bronx, and not using the next month to get some insight into whether these two can contribute in the majors next year would be a mistake.

There’s reason for hope. Kennedy finished out August brilliantly, with a 40/5 K/BB ratio over his last five starts at Class AAA, and is far too young to be written off as a minor league wonder. Hughes had a generally brutal August, but was quite effective yesterday and in his last start, and is after all just 22 years old and was considered at least as good a prospect as Chamberlain just more than a year ago. The Yankees may not be used to gearing down in September to let such pitchers take their lumps while they’re being coached and evaluated, but no matter how disastrous their seasons have been, doing so will pay dividends, either by giving the two some useful experience or by exposing them as frauds once and for all.

Finally, there’s the bullpen, where young strikeout pitchers such as Edwar Ramirez, Jose Veras, and David Robertson, who was demoted last week but seems a safe bet to see some game time this month, have shown real signs that they could evolve into a devastating setup brigade. Ramirez and Veras were already going to be pitching the late innings, as there’s no one else who can, but now they have the chance to do so with the pressure off. If the Yankees haven’t always done well developing pitchers, that’s partly because they’ve so rarely been able to let those pitchers experiment and work through failures at the major league level. These pitchers will now have that chance.

This all may seem thin consolation to Yankees fans, especially those who paid outrageous prices for tickets this year so as to get a crack at some final playoff games at Yankee Stadium, but it honestly may be for the best. 2008 was always going to be a time of transition, a year to see which young pitchers had something and which didn’t, and one on which to build for the future. Joe Girardi and Brian Cashman now have a month in which to do just that, without any distraction at all; it would be a shame if they missed the chance.

tmarchman@nysun.com