With the Yankees’ chances of making the playoffs growing more dim by the day – Baseball Prospectus puts the odds of their reaching mid-October at roughly 1 in 26,000 – there has been a corresponding rise in the chances of the Tampa directorate brandishing their long knives and purging the coaching staff, manager, or general manager.

This is particularly notable because Joe Torre had, until this season, been the Teflon manager. Thanks to his extreme popularity, it would have been difficult for the Yankees organization to replace Torre at the first sign of a losing streak, previously a constant possibility for this reactionary franchise. In the past, one could always argue that Billy Martin was too erratic, Bob Lemon too somnolent, or Bucky Dent too helpless to stay on. There was nothing controversial about Torre, no sensible rationale beyond paranoia for letting him go.

There was good reason for this. Torre was the manager who not only guided the Yankees back to the championship after nearly two decades in the wilderness, but he took a franchise that had too often been buffeted by the owner’s tempestuousness and gave it an air of both affability and reason. Torre entered New York with a long track record of failure and no great reputation as a tactician. Yet he was the first manager of the Steinbrenner regime to understand the nature of the job, that accepting the position meant taking a certain amount of abuse and tolerating interference and second-guessing. Torre possessed the self-confidence and serenity to not be consumed by the constant pressure.

By October, Torre may find that his popularity has lessened to the degree that he’s the one who is made accountable for this season’s disappointments. This, of course, would not be completely fair. The Yankees have suffered from the combination of the worst off-season performance by the club in nearly 25 years and a minor league system that has more in common with the Oklahoma dustbowl of the 1930s than with any modern agricultural superfarm.

Torre was not responsible for either of these developments, particularly the neglect of the farm. Not that he’s helped; due to randomly generated free-agent signings, the Yankees went years without a first-round draft choice. More recently, the team has not given player development the resources necessary to overcome its poor drafting position.

Teams like the A’s, also drafting low in the order and with less money, have done much more with the draft simply by not throwing away picks. By failing to cultivate youth in the same way, the Yankees have been forced to give Torre a cadre of overpriced, over-the-hill veterans who then cannot be replaced by younger, healthier, cheaper players when they falter.

Still, Torre has never seemed more vulnerable. That’s because the 2005 edition’s weaknesses have forced him to manage. That sounds like a shot, but it isn’t; the vast majority of managers avoid in-game tactics like the plague; nothing has the potential to leave a skipper with egg on his face like having to make decisions. Most, to one degree or another, prefer to foreclose their options before the game ever begins, setting the players’ roles so tightly that all possibilities for thought are precluded.

Some managers have been uncommonly successful this way. Joe Mc-Carthy, the Yankees Hall of Fame manager of the 1930s and ’40s, won pennant after pennant by picking his eight starters and leaving them in set positions – even when they didn’t quite work. When McCarthy had to improvise to win a 1948 playoff game or a close race in 1949, he panicked, made the wrong choices, and lost. Ralph Houk was the same way.

The shortcomings of the 2005 Yankees have exposed Torre. If his choosing the worst pitcher on his staff – Jeff Weaver – to blow a game in the 2003 World Series while Mariano Rivera sat in the bullpen seemed at first like a failure to have grace under pressure, it now seems like par for the course. Deprived of both the strong starting staff that he has traditionally enjoyed and a bullpen with reliable late-inning relievers, he has been forced to guess which pitchers to use on a nightly basis and has often failed.

The rigid adherence to using Rivera only in save situations has seen the best reliever in the game rot in the pen for long stretches while inferior pitchers turned leads into losses. Maybe no manager would have succeeded in these situations, but Torre has seemed particularly unable to cope or to offer innovative solutions to difficult problems.

Perhaps Tony Womack was a Trojan horse. The front office might have said: “Let’s give Joe a useless player and see if the hangs himself with him.” They did, and he did. Again, Torre didn’t pick his poison (although in the case of Womack, he did hold that poison to his bosom for the bulk of the season).Given the Byzantine nature of the Yankees organization, it’s hard to know who did.

With a weak free-agent class and dry farm, the 2006 team will struggle in the same way that the 2005 team has. If they have a new manager, he’ll be a stuffed suit, or, as The Who’s Pete Townshend put it, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Mr.Goldman is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.