As the 2006 baseball season gets underway, there are many good reasons to doubt the game’s royalty – the Yankees and Braves. The former, while blessed with a deep offense, has a thin starting rotation that will be overly dependent on pitchers like Shawn Chacon, Aaron Small, and Chien-Ming Wang, who don’t have a record of sustained success.

The Braves have some pitching depth but their bullpen is questionable and their offense and defense look spotty.

Despite these apparent flaws, both teams have qualified themselves as dynasties in the modern sense over the past decade, when extra layers of postseason play make it so much harder for teams to win championships. Had the Joe McCarthy or Casey Stengel Yankees had to play division series or league championship series, they likely would have won far fewer titles due to being victimized by the random luck inherent in short series.

One can build a great team, but age, injuries,fluctuating talent levels,the rising salaries that come with winning, and imperfect decision making all conspire to pull it apart from day to day. For this reason,putting together a repeat winner is the hardest act in sports; But it’s not impossible, as the divergent paths the Yankees and Braves have taken over the last several years has shown.

The Braves have long been divorced from the days when the munificent Ted Turner showered the team with enough money to bid on every Tom, Dick, and Andy Messersmith who arrived on the market. Now just one more unit in the Time Warner empire, the Braves play a more fiscally conservative game, depending on one of the deepest,most consistent farm systems in the business. When injuries, ineffectiveness, or personality defects (this last category reserved for Raul Mondesi) neutered a veteran lineup last season, the Braves were able to reach down to their farm system for Kyle Davies, Blaine Boyer, Brian Mc-Cann, Ryan Langerhans, Jeff Francoeur and others. This season, Chuck James, Matt Diaz (a minor league pick-up from the Royals), and Joey Devine may play important roles.

The Yankees’ faced a similar crisis last season when all three winter 2005 signings – Tony Womack, Carl Pavano, and Jaret Wright – proved to be disastrous, potentially season-destroying miscalculations. The Yankees also looked to the minors for help, pulling up Wang, Small, Robinson Cano, and Sean Henn, though this last move brought them no joy. These players were the salvation of the Yankees season.

Perhaps there should be a lesson here about the potential blessings of a youth movement, but the Yankees tapped the total exploitable depth of their farm system last year. This spring, there wasn’t much further for a youth movement to go.Off-season rumors that clubs were interested in sending the Yankees prospects in exchange for a chance to pay Pavano’s medical bills were either unfounded or not pursued by the Yankees.Meanwhile,new veterans like Kyle Farnsworth, Mike Myers, Miguel Cairo, and Kelly Stinnett were imported, and old friend Bernie Williams was retained. These moves have the potential to leave the Yankees in the same place they were last year.

The Yankees typically site their annual low drafting position (the penalty for their good finishes), but it’s important to note that Atlanta has been similarly penalized. The Braves had a draft position higher than no. 26 only once between 1994 and 2003, but they have simply been more efficient at scouting and signing minor leaguers.

This brings up a question of organizational morale – despite great resources, does a team’s scouting staff fail to excel when it knows that the organization won’t utilize the players they sign? Do the players themselves, as motivated as they might be by dreams of multi-million dollar paydays, fail to develop because they know that no matter how well they do they will be bypassed for has-beens like Ruben Sierra and never-weres like Womack? To believe otherwise is to suspect the Yankees of negligence or incompetence in the player-development arena.

Whatever the cause, this has important ramifications both for the fan experience of watching the Yankees and for the team’s pursuit of the pennant.Rather than a team of youth,speed,and resiliency, the Yankees present the turgid Last Hurrah Bombers, a crew of largely unappealing veterans who are close to finishing their careers.As talented as they are, most or all of the current Yankees will be long gone from the scene by the time Kyle Davies throws his last pitch or Jeff Francoeur hits his final home run. As an unfortunate side effect of their embrace of these players, the Yankees will keep one foot planted in the steroids era, with two key names from the Balco investigation on the roster.

It was the Yankees who pioneered the care and feeding of dynasties back in the 1950s. Ironically, the Mantle-Berra-Stengel Yankees kept their team fresh and youthful just the way the Braves are doing now, by turning the roster over frequently, spending on scouting, and trusting in their young players. Perhaps they will get back there one day. Until then, the Yanks will present a good team, perhaps a very good team,with little margin for error and more gray hairs than one likes to see on a ballclub.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for www.yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography