Yesterday, Carl Pavano started for the Yankees and pitched two innings. What he did in the game — he allowed a run on two hits and two walks, striking out none — is less important than the appearance itself; the chocolate bar-eating, massage-seeking, sports carwrecking, buttocks-bruising man of glass finally pitched in a game for the Yankees.

This is a mixed blessing. While it’s always good to have pitching depth, and even better to get some productive use out of a player who was signed to a foolhardy contract, the quixotic quest to get value out of Pavano is unlikely to have a happy ending and will cast a shadow over at least the first eight weeks of the season.

The Yankees begin the spring exhibition season with more than the usual complement of candidates for the starting rotation. There is no true ace but a plethora of variations on “solid.” In addition to groundball specialist Chien-Ming Wang and the aging duo of Mike Mussina and Andy Pettitte, the Yankees have Pavano, the Japanese import Kei Igawa; Jeff Karstens, who impressed with bulldog-style pitching last September; the rotund but powerful Humberto Sanchez, and the premium vanilla swingman Darrell Rasner.

Most of all, they have Phil Hughes, one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, and the first young Yankees pitcher in years who deserves hype, who even has hype. In his three-year minor league career, the former firstround draft pick has pitched 237 innings, allowed just 150 hits — just six of them home runs — walked 54, and struck out 269. He’s tall, throws hard, and has a curveball that quickly dives through the strike zone.

The Yankees will expend a great deal of mental energy on trying to figure out when Hughes is “ready” — he has yet to pitch above Double-A — and yet he probably is ready, an anxious spring training debut last Thursday notwithstanding. Ninety-nine percent of pitching prospects go through their entire professional lives without having a month resembling Hughes’s career line. Expecting further progress is a bit like saying, “We have Tom Seaver right now, but we think we could get Roger Clemens.”

That attitude seems almost hubristic. In actuality, it’s the opposite, an expression of timidity. When any team, not just the Yankees, has a prospect this good, it is fearful of ruining this delicate gift by “rushing” it. They fear a dose of adversity, prematurely administered, will ruin this young (not quite 21 years old) man.

Specifically, the Yankees want to avoid the temptation of pushing Hughes’s untested arm over 180 innings this year. They can achieve this by keeping him at Triple-A Scranton at the beginning of the year and artificially keeping his outings short. This will put a strain on the Scranton team’s bullpen, not unlike the one Jaret Wright inflicted on the Yankees’ major league pen last year with his typical five-inning outing.

Hughes likely will be optioned to the minors at the end of the exhibition season, no matter how well he pitches; thus, the quest to redeem Pavano. Yet, the difficult balancing act every team must pull off is that of valuing the present against the future. If Hughes is indeed ready to start the season in the bigs, then it follows that he will be able to outpitch Pavano — if he can’t, he’s not ready. Even if his outings are shortened at the beginning of the season, the benefit to the Yankees would be enormous.

The impact on the bullpen should be minimal; with the addition of Luis Vizcaino and Chris Britton, the Yankees are deeper in the pen than they were at this time a year ago. Indeed, Britton may not even make the team, leaving him, Karstens, Brian Bruney, T.J. Beam, and still others in case of reliever fatigue.

The most likely scenario for Pavano this year, if he stays healthy, is an ERA somewhere in the mid-4.00s. The secret truth is that the pitcher the Yankees have spent all this time waiting for doesn’t exist. Pavano has had just one season in his career when he was both healthy and effective, 2004. That season, the one that got him his fat Yankees sinecure, he posted an ERA of 3.00 in 222.1 innings. Even this was something of an illusion. He achieved it in the non-DH league, in a pitcher’s park, with a below-average strikeout rate.

Those 222.1 innings make up more than a fifth of his career innings. That season aside, Pavano has a career average of 4.61. Imagine the difference for the Yankees if they could open the season with a pitcher twice as effective as that, even if only in five-inning doses. If the pitcher in question wasn’t Phil Hughes, it would be a no-brainer.

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