A $20 Mickey Mouse watch can tell time just as well as a Rolex can. It’s not as pretty, and it certainly won’t last as long, but it will do the job. You can’t even be sure that you’re getting a Rolex for your money; fakes abound. In 2005, the Yankees bought any number of copycat watches. The cheap but authentic timekeepers were the ones that pulled them through to the postseason.

At the beginning of the season, the Yankees hadn’t expected that Robinson Cano, Chien-Ming Wang, Aaron Small, or Shawn Chacon would play key roles on the ballclub. Chacon wasn’t even Yankees property until late in the year. The club’s spending was supposed to eliminate the need for rookies and journeymen. It was fitting that the team’s $200 million payroll was subject to the luxury tax, because it is a luxury, pure, bald, indulgence, for a rich club to spend money on decorative baubles like Tony Womack and Jaret Wright, who served no function other than to push the club away from winning.

Every ballclub, the good and the bad, are a mix of the planned and the improvised. Very few teams are so perfectly planned that they don’t have to patch during the season. The 1927 Yankees went wire to wire without making a single move, but there was only one 1927 Yankees. The rest need their Robinson Canos and Aaron Smalls to get by, which is why money dispensed to free agents needs to be carefully thought out – if the players being acquired are not significantly better than the journeyman and the rookies, or worse, the team is going to have to rely on them anyway, despite any historic aversion to no-names the team might possess.

This is an elaborate way of saying that the Yankees didn’t know what they were buying, nor what they had. Despite team and media insistence that young players have a tougher time making with in the Yankees than with any other team, it is an incontrovertible fact that something is always better than nothing. Projected to 162 games, Cano would have been worth 35 runs above a replacement-level player. Given the same amount of playing time, Womack would have been worth 18 runs less than a replacement-level player. Had Cano utterly flopped, had he been half the player he proved to be – and he was, by no means, the next coming of Eddie Collins – he still would have been better than Womack. Seventeen runs worse than the than the worst player you could find would have been better than Womack. Cano was a lot better than that.

If it hadn’t been Cano saving the Yankees from themselves, it would have been somebody else. This was as apparent on the day of Womack’s signing as it was the day that Cano came up from the minors, so all the signing did was cost the team money and postpone the inevitable. The Yankees could have spared themselves the answer to the musical question, “How much worse than bad can a bad player get when he hits the end of the line?” Because Womack had a certain pedigree, the Yankees got suckered in, though that pedigree was entirely the invention of sportswriters who don’t understand that being able to run fast is not in and of itself a reason to play.

The real miracle of the season, if an ultimately unsuccessful season can be said to have had a miracle, is the way the Yankees successfully brought Wang to the majors (injuries aside), transformed Small from a minor league punching bag into an efficient spot starter, and helped Chacon find himself at sea level. Mel Stottlemyre, the soon-to-be-departing pitching coach, deserves much of the credit for this; despite being a target of almost universal abuse early in the season, he played a key role in keeping the team from sinking when the starting rotation fell apart.

What a starting rotation it was, too. Out in Los Angeles, Angels general manager Paul DePodesta is getting a lot of flack for putting together a roster that ignored character as a component of winning. The Yankees put together a pitching staff that ignored something far more crucial: health. Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Mike Mussina, Carl Pavano, and Jaret Wright were a collection of pitchers guaranteed to have injury problems. In their short careers, Pavano and Wright have more consistently made the disabled list than they have All-Star teams. The Yankees gambled on them and lost.

Health is an overlooked skill on the part of ballplayers. If a player isn’t in uniform, he isn’t helpful, even if he has the innate skills of Sandy Koufax. Koufax himself was probably the best pitcher in baseball in 1967, but injuries stopped him from pitching. In that sense, he was no better than the worst pitcher in the game. Small, Chacon, and Wang lacked the accomplishments of Pavano and Wright (limited though they were), but they had the advantage of availability to the team when they were needed. Again, the expensive pitcher is not necessarily the best pitcher or even the most reliable pitcher, not if he leads you down a path that ends in Darrell May and Tim Redding.

One of the reliable old aphorisms is that all that glitters is not gold. Over the last three decades the Yankees have had their Ed Whitsons and Steve Kemps but as a club, perhaps because of the instability in the executive suite over that time, they have a short memory. They have been burned but are never twice shy. This off-season, the Yankees will once again try to patch their team without rebuilding. If they’ve learned anything, they won’t jump at so-called stars who aren’t any better than what they have on hand in their own system.

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