Johnette Howard

If you’re wondering how the Yankees got back to being World Series favorites again this year — or, more correctly, what took them so freaking long, given the obscene stacks of cash they’ve been spending? — Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s coupon-clipping general manager, would seem like the last guy to be conflicted about the answer.

It’s the money, stupid. Right? How hard is it to build a $210-million contender like the Yankees have done?

Yet there is Beane on page 275 of “Moneyball,” the seminal 2004 book that laid out his number-crunching way of assembling a team, almost absolving the Yankees’ recent playoff flops by allowing that once any team gets to the playoffs, “My s--- doesn’t work … What happens after that is f------ luck.”

Then, wait — now here’s Beane on page 141 of this year’s best-seller, “The Yankee Years,” seemingly contradicting his crapshoot theory by telling Joe Torre’s co-author, Tom Verducci, that maybe you really can hoard so much talent that, “At some point, a team becomes so good that they overcome the randomness.”

“The ’98 Yankees were one of the greatest teams I ever saw,” Beane continued. “They had everything you’d want a baseball team to have.”

The 2009 Yankees could be a juggernaut in ascent. Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, knowing the club was moving into a $1.5 billion stadium and coming off a year in which they missed the postseason for the first time in 13 years, threw $423.5 million at just three players this offseason: CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and Mark Teixeira. He traded for free-spirited Nick Swisher, coaxed Andy Pettitte into sticking around, and gave some young homegrown guys a chance.

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Now look: The 2009 Yankees are a team that hits for average, hits for power, boasts a forbidding starting rotation, a resourceful bench and their deepest bullpen in years. The Yankees won their first AL East title since 2006. They broke their galling string of three consecutive first-round playoff losses by pulling the feisty little Minnesota Twins apart limb by limb like some overcooked little rotisserie chickens in a 3-0 sweep. Then they leaped to a fast start in this week’s AL Championship Series against the Los Angeles Angels, their nemesis most of this decade. Even Alex Rodriguez has looked clutch.

This is all a lousy development if you’re cheering against a Yankees’ renaissance. But that is not the worst news a Yankee hater could hear.

That would be this:

This powerhouse Yankees team we’re seeing now is what can happen when the Yankees combine their bottomless checking account with some of the Moneyball–style statistical modeling that Beane and Red Sox stats guru Bill James popularized.

The Yankees this season spent nearly $70 million more than the next closest big-payroll team, the Mets. They also spent smarter.

After signing far too many bust pitchers, Cashman admitted he more actively investigated the character of each new player this time around. Since taking sole control of the everyday baseball operations in 2006, Cashman has relied more on statistical analysis than he ever did, to the point it caused some friction with Torre before Torre walked away after the 2007 season from a one-year contract offer that seemed designed for Torre to refuse.

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