After a game like yesterday’s 3–2 defeat at the hands of the Mariners, you can understand why the Yankees are interested in Philadelphia’s Bobby Abreu.You don’t want to lose games in which Randy Johnson goes eight innings and gives up two earned runs, and anyone who sees Melky Cabrera and Aaron Guiel in the box score of such a loss can key right in on the area where the Yankees can most easily improve. That the Yanks are playing their best baseball of the season of late is almost irrelevant— starting someone like Guiel leaves Joe Torre with a thin margin of error, the kind that can narrow to nothing with one cold streak from one of the team’s remaining star hitters.

The Abreu proposition makes more sense when you look at the bigger picture. Gary Sheffield will be 38 next year and in unknown physical condition; there’s no reason the Yankees should pick up his $13 million option. Abreu, a career .302 hitter, makes $15 million next year, and could slide right into Sheffield’s salary slot and position in the lineup. It seems like a neat solution, especially if the Phillies decide they would prefer to get rid of Abreu’s contract rather than pick up a large chunk of it in exchange for receiving quality players, as they did when they traded Jim Thome to the White Sox.

In the still bigger picture, though, this is just the sort of move the Yankees should be avoiding.Next year is going to be a year of transition in the Bronx; the team can either accept that and regain its health, or continue to pile on the contracts and not win championships.

There are two problems with Abreu. The first is that he has a no-trade clause, and so has leverage. At the least, to accept a trade he would require his $16 million option for 2008 be picked up; more likely, he’d want a rich extension past that point. He isn’t worth it. Abreu was a great player in his prime, but that’s passed. At this point, he’s a liability in right field and, more worryingly, there are red sirens over him flashing that he’s done at the plate.

Yes, his .439 on-base average would fit right into any lineup, but accompanied as it is by a drastic loss of power — Abreu, playing in one of the more homerfriendly parks in the game, has just eight longballs on the year after averaging 23 over the last eight seasons — it wouldn’t bode well for his short-term future.

Abreu’s lost some bat speed, so he’s taking a lot of pitches he would have knocked into the gaps and over the fences a couple of years ago. Sooner rather than later, pitchers are going to start laying fastballs in on him, and the high on-base average — the one thing that still makes him a great player — is going to drop.

On its own, this would be cause for concern, but then there’s the broader context of the way the Yankees are structured. It’s astonishing to realize that this team has $156 million committed to 12 players next year — Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Kyle Farnsworth, and Mike Myers — and more astonishing to realize how few are likely to even match this season’s performance. Rivera and A-Rod, for sure; otherwise only Pavano and Matsui seem like decent bets, and that only because they’ve been injured this year.

This isn’t doomsaying; the Yankees will be excellent again next year. It’s just that the pattern of the last few years — a slow but steady erosion of talent punctuated by ineffectiveness or injury from a few key players — will continue as long as a core of this many old players is kept together.There’s no way to avoid it.

Starting next year, though, the Yankees are not going to be quite so old as they seem. In Chien-Ming Wang and Robinson Cano they have two cheap, solid young players; starting prospect Phillip Hughes, who is the real deal and a future stud starter providing he stays healthy, should be ready for a rotation slot next year, at which point Wang and Cano go from a pair of interesting novelties to part of a group of young Yankees. This is why next year will be a hinge year. Should the team make a commitment to Cabrera, a full fifth of the team would be comprised of young, homegrown players making between them about what Mike Myers is making this season.

Good as this would be in its own right for a variety of reasons, it would also set the Yankees up for 2008. The team already has $110.5 million in payroll committed for that year — to Rodriguez, Jeter, Giambi, Damon, Matsui, Pavano, and Farnsworth. Assuming they keep their payroll around $200 million, that will leave $90 million or so for three starting pitchers, a closer, a catcher, a bullpen, and a bench — obviously more than enough money, but only if the payroll isn’t cluttered with $12 million no. 5 starters,$17 million right fielders hitting .240, and the like.Those add up fast.

Picking up Abreu would have a bad domino effect for this off-season, when the Yanks will have around $40 million coming off the books — money that will have to pay for a starter, bench players, and relievers.Tie a third or more of that up in Abreu and you not only lose future flexibility and commit to a player who may be in a rapid decline, but suddenly you have to choose between pitching targets like Barry Zito and Jason Schmidt and quality veteran depth.

The Yankees might not get credit for it all the time, but they’re on the right track right now. They’re paying off the debts foolishly run up in the first half of this decade, and they’re going to be paying them off for a few more years, but having half your credit card debt paid off doesn’t mean you need to go out and spend back up to your limit. It means you need to keep on doing what you’re doing. For the future of the team, they need to get this right.

tmarchman@nysun.com