You can’t say the Yankees aren’t trying. This has been the most frenetic season in years, with the club having tried just about every possible solution to its problems, extending down to Edwar Ramirez and Shelley Duncan, neither of whom was looked upon as a major leaguer by even the most hard-headed of minor league enthusiasts as recently as a few months ago. Yet, despite all of the hypercaffeinated roster-shuffling, the Yankees find themselves clinging to the wild card lead in a slow-motion race that none of the three teams involved seems capable of winning.

The only weapon of past Yankees teams in distress that the 2007 edition hasn’t embraced is the lopsided, self-defeating trade, the Bob Tewksbury-for-Steve Trout-style deal, that was a hallmark of the intellectually bankrupt management of the past. Despite its many ill-considered decisions, from Doug Mientkiewicz to Kei Igawa, this reluctance to trade its young pitching for veteran help of any kind (with the barely significant exception of dealing Scott Proctor for Wilson Betemit) has been the team’s wisest policy in many a season. As the dearth of pitching deals consummated at the July and August trading deadlines shows, and the forthcoming list of free agents confirms, more than ever is pitching a commodity to be hoarded.

Whether or not the Yankees can convert that pitching from minor league potential to major league productivity is a different story. Phil Hughes, Tyler Clippard, Ian Kennedy, Chase Wright, and Matt DeSalvo have all had their moments of success, but consistency in the young is hard to come by and the Yankees don’t have a lot of experience in nurturing it or the confidence necessary to create it. With Roger Clemens hurt (or just 44 years old) and likely to miss a start, and Mike Mussina doing his best impression of a man without a fastball, they may have little choice but to keep trying over the remaining 24 games of the season. As the pitching staff caves in, the Yankees have been able to stay in the wild card race, and in fact take a lead, because they and their two main competitors, Seattle and Detroit, have been retreating faster than the Yankees have been able to. Over their past 20 games, the Yankees have gone 9–11. The Mariners and the Tigers have each gone 8–12. The Yankees have scored 95 runs, the Mariners 96, the Tigers 93. It’s on the pitching side that the three clubs are more easily distinguished from one another. The Tigers have allowed 97 runs, or 4.9 a game; the Mariners have allowed 107 runs, or 5.5 a game; and the Yankees have allowed 127 runs, or 6.4 a game.

The poor showing on the part of the pinstriped pitching staff is inflated by a few bad games; during the period in question the Yankees have lost games by scores of 12–0 (started by Jeff Karstens), 8–5 (Mussina), 18–9 (Mussina), 16–0 (Mussina again), and 9–1 (Hughes). This short list suggests some obvious solutions, such as locking Mussina in the bullpen and throwing away the key, or telling Hughes his on-the-job training is done for the year and to enjoy the view from the dugout for the rest of the year, but the Yankees don’t have that kind of flexibility. Hughes was hammered for .254 AVG/.331 OBA/.468 SLG rates in August, and anecdotal evidence suggests his velocity is not what it was prior to his long injury timeout. Still, the arm is lively, and the 6.96 runs he allowed per nine innings in August isn’t a patch on the 32 hits and 22 runs that Mussina has allowed in his last 14.1 innings pitched.

No, given the injury and relatively poor performance of Clemens, it’s a certainty that Hughes will keep starting; that Ian Kennedy will get a chance to save the season by showing the consistency that the other rookies have lacked; that Karstens’s success last year was an illusion generated by some fortuitous scheduling against poor offenses, and that Mussina may even get another chance, just by virtue of being ambulatory. The return of Igawa can’t be far away.

More than anything else, then, the outcome of the season rests on Chien-Ming Wang and Andy Pettitte. The latter had an outstanding August. The former was inconsistent, but pitched well on the whole. They are now New York’s two-man staff, the last bulwark standing between the Yankees and a slow fade from the race — slow only because the competition can’t get organized either. Pettitte failed on Sunday; Wang gets his next chance today. If they pitch well, and the Yankees can get something approaching competency out of just one of the remaining starters, they may yet limp to the finish line in possession of the wild card — at which point three starters will be all they need to survive anyway.

If not, they’ll be going home, no matter how exciting the postbreak charge has been, no matter how tawdry the competition.

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