When the Atlanta Braves fired Frank Wren as their general manager Monday, John Schuerholz invoked the term “the Braves’ way.” In 14 years of writing about the Braves’ unprecedented run of consecutive division championships, with Schuerholz as general manager and Bobby Cox as manager, I never heard about “the Braves’ way.”

Whether or not the term was used, though, there was at least an unspoken or unwritten Braves way of constructing and maintaining a championship-caliber team. No one can produce an unparalleled perennial winner without having a system.

The New York Yankees have a system. It is signified not by words but by a symbol: $

Add another $ and then another $ and a few more $$$$$, and there you have the Yankees’ way of planning for the post-season. Sometimes it works, most seasons it doesn’t.

As I write this, the Yankees are on the verge of missing the playoffs for the second straight season, the first time for back-to-back misses since 1992-93.

Unlike the Braves, however, the Yankees don’t appear to be prepared to do anything about their failures. Mark Newman, who has run the team’s mostly unproductive farm system for a quarter of a century, has disclosed his plans to retire, but his departure is long overdue.

General manager Brian Cashman has ignored Newman’s poor draft selections and player development. For that oversight alone, Cashman should be excused from further duty as the Yankees’ general manager, but he will almost certainly be offered a new contract shortly after the season.

Unlike his father, who fired two managers before their seasons were 20 games old, Hal Steinbrenner, George’s successor as managing partner, seems to have little desire to fire people. He has a much greater tolerance for losing than his father did.

With his relative inexperience in baseball, Hal might want to study the history of John Schuerholz. Given that the Braves began winning division titles the year Schuerholz became their general manager and stopped winning them a couple of years after he was elevated to club president, maybe the term “the Braves’ way” should more aptly be the Schuerholz way.

Schuerholz rejected that suggestion, but with the Braves winning only one division title in Wren’s seven years as general manager, there might be something to that idea.

Schuerholz had a knack for shuffling the Braves’ roster each winter, adding and subtracting a player or two, and turning the new players over to Cox, who worked them seamlessly into the clubhouse.

Wren’s additions didn’t work out as well as his predecessor’s did:

• He signed Derek Lowe in January 2009 to a four-year, $60 million contract.

• He acquired second baseman Dan Uggla from the Marlins in November 2010 and signed him two months later to a 5-year, $62 million contract extension.

• He signed free agent outfielder B.J. Upton in November 2012 for 5 years and $75.25 million.

Lowe gained 31 victories in his first two seasons with the Braves but had a 9-17 record his third season and was traded to the Cleveland Indians, who released him before the end of the next season.

Uggla didn’t complete four seasons of his five-year contract, batting .209 for the Braves, only .161 before they released him July 20. He subsequently played four games for San Francisco, failing to get a hit in 11 at-bats before the Giants released him.

Upton remains with the Braves, earning his average salary of $15 million a season while hitting .184 last season and .207 this.

Has the Braves’ way slipped the last few years, Cox was asked at the Braves’ news conference Monday?

“Yeah, a little bit,” said the Hall of Fame manager, who was the team’s general manager when the Braves adopted their way in the late 1980s.

“I wouldn’t say it’s missing,” Schuerholz said. “I’d say it has to be reinvigorated. That’s what we intend to do.

“Bobby Cox and I lived the Braves’ way for 17 years,” he added.

“It is our emphasis to find the Braves’ way again.”

The next day, in a telephone conversation, Schuerholz explained the Braves’ way.

“It’s not all new,” he said when I asked if it was new because I hadn’t heard the term previously. “The Braves’ way started prior to my arriving in Atlanta, when Bobby was general manager. They committed to scouting and player development and they were very successful in drafting.

“I came here having had the Orioles’ way, which Lou Gorman and I took to Kansas City. When I got hired it was easy to marry myself into the Braves’ way because it was what I started with in Baltimore. In fact, it was like home to me. It’s an overall notion that covers the whole baseball prism.”

The Braves and the Orioles are not the only teams that employ standard instructional methods throughout their organizations. Not all teams employ the practice, though it makes sense for all of them to do it.

“It’s all the things you feel you need to have winning players,” said Schuerholz, the club president the past seven years. “Put them in the hands of people who can create players whom you know well and you are confident have the character and you can rely on to have your organization grow better.”

Wren worked in the Braves’ organization for 15 years so it wasn’t a matter of his not knowing the system.

“I don’t think we had gotten away from it,” Schuerholz said, “but I felt it wasn’t operating the way it was constructed to operate to develop home-grown players. The best thing is to have your own pipeline of players. Each organization has an idea of what they want to do to develop players. I wanted it refocused on that and we intend to do that.”

The Yankees, of course, don’t have a pipeline of players. Their pipeline is clogged with dollar bills. It has been empty of players since Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter came gushing out in the first half of the 1990s.

The Yankees don’t use the words scouting and player development. Their vocabulary begins and ends with the words free agents.

“My desire is to see to it that that aspect of our organization is as strong as it could be,” Schuerholz said. “That helped me to make my decision. We feel like we’re doing the right thing here. That’s our plan. Part of my decision-making was to heighten, enliven and recapture in the best possible way the Braves’ way. Scouting and player development is the lifeblood of any major league organization.”