Hank Steinbrenner can blame the injuries. Others can blame the hitting. To see where the Yankees went wrong, however, I believe you have to look at the pitching and the decisions the team’s brain trust made about its pitching last winter.

Injuries are something every contender has to deal with. How it deals with and overcomes its injuries can determine how far a team goes.

Steinbrenner, who has replaced his father as the Yankees’ outspoken spokesman, lamented recently the toll injuries had taken on the Yankees. Jorge Posada is out for the season, Hideki Matsui missed a huge chunk of the schedule and Chien-Ming Wang, the No. 1 pitcher, hasn’t pitched since June 15 and isn’t expected to pitch until next April.

In addition, all three of the Yankees’ young pitchers, the horses the Yankees were going to ride into October, have endured injuries.

But let’s look at two other contenders and their injuries.

The Mets have played most of the season without two-thirds of their outfield. Moises Alou won’t be back; Ryan Church may be but only after missing more than 10 weeks. Second baseman Luis Castillo has been on the disabled list for more than six weeks. Orlando Hernandez has not pitched an inning all season, and Pedro Martinez has pitched far fewer innings than the Mets had expected. Closer Billy Wagner is on the disabled list.

In Boston, Curt Schilling has been out all season; Daisuke Matsuzaka missed some time and Tim Wakefield and Bartolo Colon are on the disabled list, Colon for the past two months; Julio Lugo has missed more than a month and David Ortiz couldn’t play for nearly two months, matching the time Matsui was out of the Yankees lineup.

Injuries have not knocked the Mets and the Red Sox out of their respective division races. They have not cited injuries as a fatal problem. Hank Steinbrenner did not return a call seeking comment on the injury issue.

But if the Yankees can’t legitimately cite injuries for their division-race deficiencies, how about their deficient hitting? The Yankees won’t get any sympathy from other contenders there either.

The Yankees have a higher team batting average than the White Sox, the Angels and the Rays and have scored more runs than the Angels and the Rays, who have dominated their divisions. The Yankees have scored nearly as many runs as the Red Sox and White Sox, averaging 4.85 runs a game to Boston’s 5.14 and Chicago’s 5.11.

Self-proclaimed statistics aficionados could probably come up with a reason – maybe many reasons — why these particular statistics are irrelevant and don’t tell the real story, but hitting and scoring runs are time-tested clues to a team’s success or lack thereof.

So are the basic pitching statistics, and a glance at current pitching statistics tells a tale about the Yankees. In short, they are short on pitching, and that shortage stems from their off-season strategy.

In a stark departure from practices the Yankees had followed during their championship seasons, they decided they were going to win with young stallions – Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy in the starting rotation and Joba Chamberlain in the bullpen.

In championing those plans, the lead strategist, general manager Brian Cashman, eschewed the opportunity to add a superstar to the staff, a two-time Cy Young award winner, fellow named Johan Santana.

George Steinbrenner would never have passed up a chance to acquire a pitcher of Santana’s caliber, as sure a thing as there is in baseball. The owner often added veteran pitchers with far less credentials and far more age. If a pitcher of Santana’s ability had been available, Steinbrenner would not have given a second thought to trading a good young pitching prospect.

Hank Steinbrenner, demonstrating that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, favored going for Santana. If the cost would be Hughes, so be it.

In the years he operated the Yankees, George Steinbrenner was often criticized for sacrificing young players for veterans, often aging veterans. Gene Michael changed that pattern when he was the team’s general manager in the early 1990s, during Steinbrenner’s suspension for paying a sad-sack gambler to produce information he could use in his squabble with Dave Winfield.

If so many of us thought Steinbrenner was wrong for constantly using young players as trade fodder, now that the Yankees want to keep their youngsters, should we criticize them for passing on Santana and retaining Hughes? Yes. It’s one thing to take up rotation spots with pitchers like Ed Whitson and Andy Hawkins; it’s another to relinquish the untested Hughes to secure the established 29-year-old star and staff leader that Santana is.

Hank Steinbrenner favored making the deal but let himself be talked out of it, which his father never did. Hank ultimately agreed with Cashman’s position, and Minnesota traded Santana to the Mets.

With a little bit of help from the Mets’ bullpen and their hitters, Santana could easily have 15 to 17 wins. Could the Yankees use a pitcher of his dominating talent?

While the Yankees, despite appearances, have a better hitting team than most of the other contenders, they lag behind the others in pitching.

The Yankees are seventh in earned run average at 4.24. The Rays, the White Sox, the Angels and the Red Sox all have lower e.r.a.s, all under 4.00. In fact, the 32-point difference between sixth-place Boston’s 3.92 and the Yankees’ 4.24 is the greatest between two teams except for the teams with the two highest e.r.a.s, Baltimore and Texas.

A similar situation exists with the Yankees’ starting pitchers. They rank eighth while the Rays’ starters have the lowest e.r.a followed by the Angels fourth, the Red Sox fifth and the White Sox seventh. And the .40 difference between the White Sox and the Yankees is the greatest except for that Orioles to Rangers combination at the bottom of the rankings.

Relief pitchers? The same four contenders have lower e.r.a.s than the Yankees’ relief crew.

Would Santana have made a difference? Given his career and season performance, it’s safe to say he would have made a huge difference.

As much as the Yankees miss Wang, they would have missed him a lot less if they had Santana. Mike Mussina’s surprising performance would have been more of a luxury than a necessity. The injuries to Hughes and Kennedy and their inability to win even one game between them would not have been so devastating.

Nor would the Yankees have needed to make the bizarre mid-season move of converting young, hard-throwing Chamberlain from the bullpen to the starting rotation. There’s another area in which the brain trust messed up.

Again it was Hank Steinbrenner who pronounced before spring training began that Chamberlain would be a starter this season. Again it was Cashman who overruled the new boss and said Chamberlain would start this season where he finished last season — in the bullpen—only to be forced by circumstances to change in mid-stream.

Someone once advised against changing horses in mid-stream. The Yankees’ problem is they bet on the wrong horses, and their poor judgment is making it extremely difficult for them to win or place.