For the Yankees, this has been the season of second chances. They got off to a miserable start, and though they have played very well since finally getting above the .500 mark in mid-June, at first it appeared that the Red Sox and Rays were too far ahead and too good to catch. Now the Yankees are very much alive.

Jason Giambi seemed finished, then he grew a mustache. Robinson Cano forgot how to hit, then he remembered. Joe Girardi seemed nervous and indecisive, then he found a bullpen. Most of all, in a season in which the starting rotation had to be reinvented on the fly, Mike Mussina learned how to pitch again. Thanks to him and his up-from-the-ashes teammates, 2008 now has the potential to be another 1978.

By pitching eight scoreless innings against the Minnesota Twins yesterday and propelling the Yankees to their 10th consecutive victory at home, Mussina added yet another chapter to his now-storied comeback. Just last season, Mussina’s velocity had clearly dropped but he hadn’t gotten the message, continuing to pitch like he could still buzz one past a hitter when he needed to. He couldn’t. The result was slow pitches out over the plate that came flying back at Mussina with much greater velocity than he had given them on their inbound journey. Still, he pitched into the second week of August with decent results, making 11 quality starts in 20 with an ERA of 4.50. These were not the results of the annual Cy Young candidate of old, but they would do.

That’s when the wheels came off. Riding a string of three consecutive quality starts into a Stadium appearance against the Tigers, Mussina was pounded. His next start, against the Angels, was even worse. Finally, an encore appearance against the Tigers in Detroit resulted in a 16-0 shellacking. Joe Torre reluctantly sent the Moose, who had never done anything but start, to the bullpen. Mussina made one relief appearance, giving up two runs in 3.2 innings, but Torre pronounced the results encouraging. After finding no more relief work for Mussina to do, Torre returned him to the rotation, where he made four starts, three of them successful, posting a 3.28 ERA in 24.2 innings over the rest of the season. Ominously, in his last regular season appearance of the year, Mussina was again thrashed.

The 39-year-old picked up where he left off this spring, getting lashed in three of his first four starts, including consecutive poundings at the hands of the Red Sox, a major part of the Yankees’ early slide and still part of the deficit they must overcome to reach the postseason. At that moment, with the Yankees still trying to keep Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy in the rotation Chien-Ming Wang healthy, his contract up, and the specter of Joba Chamberlain’s conversion to the starting rotation looming over all, Mussina was staring professional extinction in the eye.

Somehow, improbably, Mussina finally heard what those around him had been saying for almost a year. He still had enough stuff to pitch successfully if he just pitched smarter, relying on his always excellent control to attack the hitters’ weaknesses and eschewing the kind of power versus power challenge that he had been losing. In his next start, against the White Sox in Chicago on April 23, he pitched seven innings and allowed just two runs. Since then, with the exception of an aberrant start against the Orioles where a Derek Jeter error helped trigger a wild, first-inning meltdown, Mussina has been no less than dominant. In 17 starts, the old pitcher has gone 12-3 with a 2.76 ERA in 101 innings. While his strikeout levels have not quite rebounded to his old level of seven or eight per nine innings, he’s close at six and change.

More impressively, Mussina’s control, always impeccable, is now nearly perfect. Since his reinvention, Mussina has averaged just a fraction over one walk per nine innings. His hit rate has remained a bit high, but the Yankees defense is far from airtight, and in any case, between the almost complete lack of free passes and just seven home runs allowed over those 101 innings, opposing offenses have had difficulty building big innings against him.

With the Yankees heading to Fenway for a three-game bout with the Red Sox, the summer of second chances will either continue or be prove to have been a fleeting mirage. Mussina won’t pitch in that series, but other second chancers (Joba Chamberlain, used to be a reliever, now is a starter; Sidney Ponson, agitated his way out of Texas, now a valued member of the Yankees) will. Meanwhile, Hideki Matsui and Jorge Posada have chosen rehabilitation over surgery in an effort to get their own second chances. You would think that at some point the Yankees would run out of do-overs, mulligans, and double-or-nothings, but as in 1978, maybe, just maybe, they won’t.

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