The New York Yankees (nee Highlanders) died quietly at home Wednesday night of unnatural causes.

The Major League Baseball team, which resided in a historic building on 161 Street and River Avenue in the Bronx, N.Y., was in apparently robust health as recently as last Saturday.

Doctors, however, had noted signs of deteriorating health as early as the beginning of the year. But the team ignored the frequent and pointed advice of professional diagnosticians to change its physical make-up to increase its chances of long-term survival.

A healthy and vigorous staff of starting pitchers is an essential element in the physical well-being of a baseball team. The Yankees were told repeatedly that their starters were flaccid and prone to breakdown at critical moments. When that happens to a team, it draws upon its reserves of relief pitchers, a component the Yankees had in abundance.

It is felt that in order to thrive in October, when baseball teams are most prone to sudden illness and death, a team must have at least one pitcher who wins 18 or more games. The Yankees had none who won even 15 games, and its ability to win 101 games during the summer and early fall was due exclusively to the heroic efforts of the relief pitchers.

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Experts felt that the Yankees’ excessive reliance on the back-up pitching would put undue strain on that system and ultimately lead to its breakdown. Indeed, just last Sunday and Monday, Mariano Rivera, the strongest and most dominant member of that group, failed to function properly, ultimately causing the Yankees to lose two ballgames that it needed to survive.

As pressure on the pitching increased, the team’s offense began to suffer and the entire team over its last four days of life showed increasing signs of discomfort, marked by increased difficulty in breathing, as if it were choking.

One after another, key components failed. The third baseman, Alex Rodriguez, who, as recently as last year was considered the best individual player in the game, failed in repeated efforts to deliver hits that might have led to the revival of the victim. The right fielder, Gary Sheffield, showed identical symptoms to Rodriguez. The catcher, Jorge Posada, also failed to perform to specifications, perhaps because of extreme fatigue that was exacerbated by not being given a day off after a 14-inning game on Monday.

Immediate post-mortem observations revealed a lack of clutch hitting, a symptom that is normally associated with an absence either of heart or of regenerative organs. Disinterested analysts suggested that these lacks had been evident for some time, offering as proof the team’s early demise in each season dating back to 2001, when it suffered a sudden and fatal seizure in the last game of the World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Several players who had had abundance of heart and repeatedly performed beyond specifications in clutch situations left the team after that season, most notably Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius, who retired, and Tino Martinez, who was traded. After last year, when the Yankees again died in October, the team lost pitchers David Wells, Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens. Those critical pieces were never replaced.

The team performed remarkably well during the regular season and seemed as healthy as the Chinese economy just a week ago, as it won three games against the Red Sox with relative ease.

The Yankees had always drawn strength from the team’s ability to intimidate its opponents. But, even after winning the first three games of the ALCS, it failed to reduce the Red Sox to the moribund state that team had always resorted to at the sight of pinstripes.

The victim had also had a remarkable ability to draw on reserves of strength in October to fight off the calamities that await most teams during that month. But this year, the team had no reserves. Instead of growing stronger and more aggressive under stress, it grew weaker and more passive.

What made the team’s decline more alarming to its legions of friends and fans was the fact that the Yankees were collapsing under the weight of repeated assaults by the Boston Red Sox, its hated and sworn enemy and a team the Yankees had treated like a younger stepbrother over the years.

More than 55,000 friends of the team gathered around its bedside Tuesday and Wednesday, cheering and clapping and shouting encouragement in a vain effort to revive it.

As the friends watched in horror, the Yankees’ condition worsened before their eyes, unable to do the things it had always done so easily. Everyone seemed to understand that the end was at hand when the Yankees meekly allowed the despised Red Sox, to treat it with disdain in its own home.

While those who had loved the Yankees struggled against their grief, the Red Sox, showing an appalling lack of sensitivity to the feelings of those gathered around the bedside, danced and hugged one another on the Yankees’ lush green carpet.

ALCS RESULTS Red Sox win series 4-3 Winner Loser Game 1 Yankees 10 Red Sox 7 Game 2 Yankees 3 Red Sox 1 Game 3 Yankees 19 Red Sox 8 Game 4 Red Sox 6 Yankees 4 12 innings Game 5 Red Sox 5 Yankees 4 14 innings Game 6 Red Sox 4 Yankees 2 Game 7 Red Sox 10 Yankees 3

Most distressing to the bereaved, the Red Sox showed no signs of being afflicted with the chronic disease that always recurs when the team is close to being the sole survivor of a baseball season. The syndrome is called the Curse of the Bambino, and has been invariably fatal. Repeated efforts over the past 86 years have failed to provide a cure.

Some have speculated that the Red Sox were inoculated against the curse by a similar malady that apparently infected the Yankees at the end of last season, when its bench coach and Yoda-like presence, Don Zimmer, abandoned the team in disgust at the irrational and objectionable behavior of the Yankees’ creator, George Steinbrenner.

Called the Curse of Zim, the syndrome was only theoretical until Wednesday, when the Yankees’ sudden death without a fight convinced professional analysts that the Yankees, indeed, had contracted a curse of their own that ultimately proved fatal.

An autopsy will be performed, after which George the Creator is expected to tear the victim’s corpse to pieces and rebuild it with massive applications of money and big-name free agents. It is not known whether anything he can do, however, will protect the reborn Yankees from repeated attacks of the Curse of Zim.