One of baseball’s most famous cautionary tales is that of the demise of Dizzy Dean. Beginning in 1932, Dean was the quotable righthanded ace of the St. Louis Cardinals. During those years, Dean won as many as 30 games in a season, won four strikeout titles, and was the 1934 MVP. By 1937, when Dean was just 27 years old, it was all over.

Dean was rolling to another great season in 1937 when he started the All-Star game. Earl Averill lined a ball off of Dean’s foot, breaking a toe. Dean didn’t give the injury time to heal and altered his pitching motion to compensate for the pain. The change shredded his arm. His fastball gone, Dean had just 13 wins left in his career.

The Cardinals didn’t fire their director of “performance enhancement” coach after Dean wrecked his career, as the Yankees did today, terminating Marty Miller after Phil Hughes became the team’s sixth hamstring casualty of the season. In an era when the overspecialization of coaching had yet to be perfected, it’s doubtful that the Cardinals employed anyone overly concerned with the ballplayers’ conditioning. Even if they had worked with such a person, firing him would have made as much sense as the Yankees’ termination of Miller, which is to say very little, because proving cause and effect in these cases is just about impossible.

The only thing certain about Dean’s story is that he broke his toe. The connection to his arm injury is persuasive but hardly conclusive. We now know that heaping innings on a young pitcher’s arm is the quickest way of destroying his long-term prospects short of a Brien Taylor-style bar fight. From 1932 to 1936, no pitcher in baseball threw as many innings as Dean’s 1,531.1. Only one pitcher was within 150 innings of his total. His toe injury may have led directly to his arm injury and caused him to exacerbate an already extant condition, or have been a total coincidence.

Hughes’s hamstring also presents problems when one is trying to assign blame. We know the Yankees have had injuries, that Miller’s strength and conditioning program differed from that of previous seasons, and that some players disliked it and opted out.

Different, however, does not automatically equal bad, dangerous, or damaging. So far we have a great deal of hearsay about the Miller program, with few specifics attached. Until we know that what Miller was encouraging the players to do was damaging, we cannot possibly conclude whether he was incompetent, misguided, or just unlucky. Today, Brian Cashman said that, “It got to the point where the perception is there’s a problem here.” Key word: “perception.” People think there is a problem.

Miller was a Cashman hire, so it is unsurprising that he would be hesitant to be too definitive lest he indict himself as having made an unwise choice (as we go to press we are waiting on further elaboration from the Yankees GM). Still, Cashman is correct, because the evidence is circumstantial. The hamstrings tore on Miller’s watch, but no one, not even a doctor, can say that he tore them. That will be apparent when, a week or two from now, after Miller has ceased to be even a footnote to the season, the next hamstring is injured. Who will the Yankees blame then? No doubt someone will say that it results from damage done by Miller’s program, but that argument will be even more specious than the current effort to assign blame.

Though Miller has been executed for his alleged crimes, the Yankees must still pick up the pieces and try to win a division title. Although the probable length of Hughes’s stay on the disabled list has yet to be established, it seems reasonable to assume that he might miss six or eight weeks. Add in rehab time and the prized prospect won’t be seen in pinstripes for some time to come. In his absence, the Yankees are short of hard throwers. Each of the young starters at Triple-A Scranton — Ross Ohlendorf, Matt DeSalvo, Tyler Clippard, Steven Jackson — has something to recommend them, but none is the candidate for quick success that Hughes was. DeSalvo is off to the best start of the four, but he operates on deception rather than stuff, fights his control, and suffered something close to a career-ending crisis of confidence last year. A quick promotion could end badly.

That leaves Darrell Rasner, the journeyman righty that Cashman grabbed off of waivers last year. As the GM’s moves go, it was a far better one than the decision to hire Miller, and now it will have to serve as a consolation for the loss of Hughes and a major setback in the team’s chances.

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