If the Yankees’ 25-man roster were an economy, journalists would be obligated to call it “sclerotic,” and it would have trouble joining the European Union. The Yanks aren’t much for market forces when it comes to major league jobs.

Going into spring training this year, there isn’t a single hitting job up for competition, even a bench job, and while there are some questions over who will start and who will relieve, there isn’t much more question over which 12 pitchers are going to open the year with the team. This is only partly because the Yankees sport a pricey everyday player at every position save second base, where Robinson Cano is a cheap everyday player.

Joe Torre is a great believer in set roles, and while he does many things well, being flexible isn’t among them. Most managers of his quality, faced with a position at which they don’t have a set regular, will form a platoon or job-sharing arrangement of one sort or another, and perhaps eventually turn the job over to the player who performs best. Torre doesn’t do simultaneity; when he’s lacked a good right fielder or second baseman, he’s just rolled out one player after another sequentially, watching them fail in turn rather than figuring out if there might not be a way to take advantage of their specific strengths and weaknesses – hitting groundball or flyball pitchers better, for instance.

This isn’t an insuperable flaw, but a consequence of his style is that the Yankees can very rarely take chances with players who do one or two things very well. Torre will never find a way to use them. All this is why there’s some truth to the frequently levied charge that he’s just a push-button manager who wins because his team is fabulously rich.

If you need some evidence of all this, just look at who the Yankees have dragged into spring training. Most teams, even clubs with well-settled rosters like the Mets, will invite anything vaguely animate just to see what happens. (I mean that literally: The Mets will be taking a look at Jose Lima, who last year had possibly the worst season in major league history, racking up a 6.99 ERA in 32 starts.) The Yankees haven’t even bothered to do that; while other teams happily invite the living dead, the Bronx Bombers cultivate a taste for what can only be described as the undead, players with no chance whatsoever of making the team, players no one knew were still playing professional baseball.

There’s no exaggeration here, reader. Excepting the usual prospects who are brought into camp so the coaches can get a look at them before sending them back down to the bush leagues, the Yanks have invited four reasonably prominent players to camp. One is Al Leiter, who will either make the team or retire. The others are Russ Johnson, Ben Davis, and Mark Corey.

Of these three, Corey is the most intriguing, not because he has any chance of making the team – he has a career 6.02 ERA in 89 2/3 innings, a number that probably overstates his talent, and he hasn’t pitched in the big leagues since 2004 – but because he is beloved by all right-minded New York baseball fans for his brief dalliance with fame in 2001, when he had a postgame seizure which he confessed had been caused by smoking marijuana. Today’s ballplayers are, in public at least, a dull and cautious lot; any player who falls prey to presumably PCPlaced marijuana must be celebrated. Sadly, he is not only the most intriguing, but the best of the bunch.

Davis was once considered one of the best prospects in baseball when he was coming up as in the Padres’ system. He turned out to be a .237 hitter with no discernible defensive skills, and he, too, hasn’t played in the majors since 2004. Is he going to camp to model new batting practice uniforms? Who knows?

Johnson might be the worst of the lot. He washed out of baseball after hitting .216 with the Devil Rays in 2002, before mysteriously washing up with the Yanks last year, hitting .222 in 22 games in which he inexplicably played – games which show there is, after all, hope for the likes of Corey, Davis, and your mother.

While the uselessness of these players is amusing enough, the fact that they’re the only ones the Yanks have bothered to scrounge up points to a serious problem. Last year, after all, the team’s season was saved by Aaron Small, who had an even worse resume than any of these guys and ended up going 10-0 down the stretch while the big-money starters licking their wounds in the dugout.

Given that experience, you’d think the Yankees might be a bit more open to the possibility that fringe players are worth signing, worth keeping around, and sometimes even worth playing. Torre might like his veterans and his set roles, but what he should like most of all is winning.

tmarchman@nysun.com