After the Yankees made their shocking exit from the 2004 season, everyone – lovers and haters alike – agreed on the culprit: the pitching staff. As 2005 dawned, the Bronx brain trust dumped several pitchers in favor of the high-priced arms of Randy Johnson, Jaret Wright, and Carl Pavano. But with 51 games in the books and a 4.61 staff ERA, the new season is nonetheless shaping up to be the third straight year of declining effectiveness for the Yankees’ staff.

The sudden downturn of 2004 was not at all surprising; the Yankees had lost Andy Pettitte, David Wells, and Roger Clemens, three top pitchers representing more than 40% of the team’s 2003 innings. Any team would find it difficult to replace even one of these pitchers, let alone all three of them. It’s a testament to the organization’s resilience that the team won 101 games despite the failures of its renovated rotation.

Still, no baseball team is a static entity, and the Yankees’ consistent failure to replace their last world championship caliber staff has focused attention on the way the team has handled its pitching. For the first time since the late 1980s,the Yankees have faced criticism over which pitchers they have kept and which they have given away. That criticism can only intensify after last night’s game, when Pavano was tagged for five runs in the third straight ignominious loss to the Royals.

Indeed, the success of a number of ex-Yankees starters has caused aspersions to be cast on Mel Stottlemyre’s seeming inability to counsel his pupils, and how this failure has negatively affected the team’s decision to discard certain pitchers. There is some validity to this charge, as the recent success of the six discarded starters from the 2004 staff attests.

Two of those pitchers, Jon Lieber and Orlando Hernandez, actually helped the Yankees last season, though in ways that require qualification. With a low strikeout rate and a .301 opponents’ batting average, Lieber was far too dependent on the defense for a team that has not made catching the ball a priority for a number of years. It was easy to imagine a 2005 Lieber against whom just a few more balls fell in, thereby pushing him across the thin line dividing success and failure for a pitcher of his type. This, combined with an acknowledged misreading of the winter pitching market, led the Yankees to make the free agent a low offer, which he shunned before splitting for Philadelphia.

Hernandez, though usually effective, had made a grand total of 136 starts since 1998.He was sidelined in the 2004 playoffs by a sore shoulder, which was arguably the result of Joe Torre allowing him to throw 123 pitches (his highest total in over two years) in his penultimate start of the season. The Yankees viewed this as a sign of Hernandez’s age and fragility, and abandoned him in the interest of staff stability and “youth” – namely Pavano and Wright.

The other departed starters, Jose Contreras (traded to the White Sox for Esteban Loaiza last July), Loaiza himself (allowed to leave as a free agent), Javier Vazquez, and Brad Halsey (both traded for Johnson), suggest a deeper problem: The Yankees don’t do projects.

Despite incredible stuff, Cuban star Contreras never seemed comfortable with in New York. He maintained an above-average strikeout rate but lacked control and always seemed to throw the wrong pitch at the wrong time; had he thrown 200 innings with the Yankees last season, he would have given up more than 40 home runs. Upon arriving in Chicago, Contreras immediately cut his home run rate nearly in half. He has carried this over to 2005, putting up a 3.30 ERA in 60 innings. His walk rate, actually higher than in New York, suggests there will be a day of reckoning in his near future. Still, Contreras’s sudden progress – with the aid of White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper – is an indictment of the Yankees’ inability to turn him into a useful player.

Vazquez mysteriously went bad halfway through last season. The problem wasn’t physical, and all parties agreed that the former Expos fireballer was not intimidated by New York; still, the problem could not be solved. After the Yankees washed their hands of Vazquez, it took just three starts in 2005 for Diamondbacks pitching coach Mark Davis to diagnose the problem: Vazquez had been tipping his pitches. In his eight starts since April 20,Vazquez is 5-1 with a 1.92 ERA and 50 strikeouts in 61 innings.

Similarly, Loaiza struggled last year to recapture his 2003 stuff, but still managed an ERA of 4.86 with the White Sox, in the neighborhood of the league average. His ERA jumped to an unsustainable 8.50 after he was dealt to the Yankees. It was not until he was used for some desperation relief work in the playoffs that the pitcher showed signs of recovery. This season, Nationals pitching coach Randy St. Claire has succeeded where Stottlemyre failed, helping Loaiza to pitch effectively as a starter (3.56 ERA in 78 1 /3 innings).

Even Halsey, the young lefty with less than overpowering stuff, has pitched well this year, posting a 2.98 ERA in 66 1 /3 innings. The failure to properly exploit Halsey last season is less the fault of the pitching coach than more evidence of the systemic problem that has persisted for the entire Steinbrenner period. The Yankees are distrustful of pitchers produced in their own farm system, don’t know how to promote them through the minors to the majors, and don’t allow the few who make it all the way through the chain the room to learn from failure. Consider that just nine pitchers raised in the Yankees’ farm system during the 32-year Steinbrenner ownership have started 30 career games for the team!

With the Yankee juggernaut teetering on the brink of collapse, the direction of the franchise may rest with farm products like rookie starter Chien-Ming Wang, who has pitched capably in six games this season. Given the proper amount of time and attention, the 25-year-old Taiwanese pitcher could signal a return to the days when the Yankees were confident enough to grow their own baseball team.

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