Mike Celizic

Al Leiter all but cried when the Yankees picked him up for next to nothing from the Florida Marlins. Most other people in baseball came to actual tears at the news — but they were tears of laughter.

Leiter is 39 years old and his ERA was 6.64. This wasn’t a carefully planned and canny bit of deadline trading. It was a desperate move by a team that had lost four starting pitchers to injury and needed a body with a semi-live arm attached to start the final game of a four-game series against the Red Sox.

Leiter was a nice sentimental story. He had started his career with the Yankees, and was wildly popular during a long stint with the Mets. The Yankees hoped — maybe wished is the better word — that a return to his roots would energize him. But mostly, they got him because he was all that was available.

And, a lot of people thought, he was a joke.

In sports, as in life, it’s funny — no joke — how things work out. Leiter turned out to be more than a stop-gap. He held the powerful Red Sox to one run on three hits while striking out eight in 6 1/3 innings. And when the game was done, the resurrected Yankees, who had started the season’s second half in third place, 2 1/2 games out of first, were in second place and just half a game behind their rivals.

Just when the Yankees most needed a lift, they got it. Coming into Boston, they would have been happy to split the four games, and they had already guaranteed that by winning Thursday and Saturday. What more could they hope for?

Four days earlier, the Yankees were down to two starting pitchers — Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina. Chien-Ming Wang, who led all New York starters in ERA and had a 6-3 record after being called up from Columbus, had just gone down with a shoulder problem that might finish him for the year, Jaret Wright had been sidelined early in the year. Kevin Brown and Carl Pavano were rehabbing.

The Yankees had started Tim Redding on Friday and watched him give up the first six of 17 runs the Red Sox amassed. They were talking about pitching the unreliable Brown Sunday.

Instead, they got Leiter, Leiter got inspired, and the Yankees were within a whisker of their goal — first place.

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They’re hardly out of the woods. New York is off to Texas for the beginning of 16 games against the Rangers, Twins, Indians and Angels. A lot of bad things can happen against those teams and, even with Brown returning Monday, the team still has just four starting pitchers and no idea who’s going to pitch Wednesday.