It would be a very bad idea for the Yankees to look past the Red Sox to their World Series opponent. If Boston takes the next two games in the American League Championship Series – which is arguably likelier than not, given the fairly even pitching matchups we’ll see over the weekend and the huge home field advantage the Sox offense has had in Fenway Park this year – all feelings of Yankee triumphalism will quickly abate, as Joe Torre and his seasoned veterans are certainly well aware.

The rest of us, though, are free to acknowledge that the Red Sox, faced with having to win four of five games with the abominable Derek Lowe in place of ace Curt Schilling, have basically no chance. This is surprising to those of us who picked the Red Sox as the stronger team, but these things are decided on the diamond rather than in newspaper columns for good reason.

It follows, then, that the big question remaining for the Yankees is how they match up against Houston and St. Louis. It’s close, but Yankee fans who want to see their team win a 27th championship should be rooting for the Cardinals.

The issue is truly dominant players. Right now Houston has four of them – starters Roger Clemens and Roy Oswalt, reliever Brad Lidge, and outfielder Carlos Beltran, who has thus far been the best player in the postseason. St. Louis has two – first baseman Albert Pujols and outfielder Jim Edmonds.

Third baseman Scott Rolen may be the key – at this point, he is an unknown quantity. Reduced by a strained calf from an MVP-caliber player to the hobbling hacker who went 0-for-12 in the Division Series, he started last night’s game trying to drive the ball at the plate and dive for it in the field without moving below his waist.

Rolen ended the night hitting two crucial home runs. If last night indicates a return to form, it changes the complexion of the Cardinals lineup. If it was an isolated showing – which I’m inclined to believe, given Rolen’s unusually stiff defensive play – the injury is potentially as costly to his team as Schilling’s is to the Red Sox.

Houston has obvious and exploitable holes at the bottom of the lineup and in the rotation. They also have two starters capable of completely shutting the Yankees down; a closer who set a major league record for strikeouts per 9 innings this year and is restricted neither to pitching one inning at a time nor to pitching in the ninth inning alone; and Beltran, who hit his sixth postseason home run last night and is as hot as you’re going to see anyone get in the playoffs. What all this does is take control out of the hands of their opponents in certain situations and for games at a time.

St. Louis, on the other hand, is reliant on consistency. There’s no pair of hitters as bad as Brad Ausmus and Jose Vizcaino in their lineup, but there’s also no pair of pitchers anywhere near the caliber of Clemens and Oswalt in their rotation. They actually greatly resemble the Yankees right now with their questionable starting pitching and great middle of the order.

The difference is that in this comparison the Yankees win. Mike Mussina and Jon Lieber can both be envisioned getting shelled out of a game in the third inning, but both have pitched like aces so far, and you have to think they’ll continue to do so. The St. Louis starters are all of the same general class as the Twins’ Brad Radke and Carlos Silva, whom the Yankees throttled in the Division Series, but have worse control and greater fly-ball tendencies; it’s hard to imagine them being much more than competent against the Yankee lineup.

Both New York and St. Louis feature devastating hearts of the order, but Rolen’s injury means that the Cardinals’ is sometimes only three men deep, while the Yankees’ goes five. And Mariano Rivera is a pitcher of an entirely different order than Jason Isringhausen, a good but fairly generic closer.

Houston is an entirely different sort of team, or rather two different teams. One runs the likes of Brandon Backe and Peter Munro out on the mound to open playoff series, and the other sports two pitchers who went a combined 38-14 in the regular season. The Yankees would probably destroy the first team, but given how hard they had to work to go up 2-0 against the Red Sox with Schilling basically unable to pitch and Pedro Martinez hardly in his best form, the prospect of facing Clemens and Oswalt four times in a seven-game series should be a frightening one.

The Astros probably aren’t going to beat St. Louis. Their rotation is out of sorts, their bullpen past Lidge is discouraging, Tony LaRussa is one of the great managers of modern times, as frustrating as his games can be to watch.

But as the Florida Marlins showed last year, the World Series isn’t always a question of which team is better, but which team is better in what way. If it’s New York and St. Louis for the prize, I’m fairly sure that we’ll see a parade down Broadway come November; if it’s New York and Houston, I have no idea.