On Sunday Carl Pavano pitched for the New York Yankees.

On Sunday, the four-year, $39 million-and-change pitcher left the game with a hip injury of some sort.

On Sunday the fans booed Pavano.

It’s the front office the team should be booing. Every year since 1993 the Yankees have made the playoffs. During the mid- and late-1990s the front office supplemented homegrown superstars like Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter with out-of-town veterans like Paul O’ Neill and Tino Martinez.

Pitching staffs built with system guys like Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera were helped by outsiders like David Wells and Jeff Nelson.

Then in the late 90s and the 2000s, the budget exploded and every position needed to be filled by a superstar. Solid role players like Charlie Hayes and Chad Curtis were no longer free agent targets. The team dumped four prospects for ChuckKnoblauch; dropped megabucks on starters Orlando Hernandez, Roger Clemens and Hideki Irabu; and ultimately, in 2002, broke the bank for alleged-steroid abuser Jason Giambi, who came from Oakland for about $120 million.

Some of the moves paid off as the team kept winning divisions and, even through the early 2000s, made it to World Series. But as the payroll kept going up the length of time the Bronx Bombers spent in the playoffs kept going down. As the team kept adding Alex Rodriguez here and Gary Sheffield there, Javier Vazquez here and Kevin Brown there, the mystique of the Yankees – the dominance of a team built around a fanatic need to win rather than a selfish need for individual success – started sliding down the drain.

Finally, after division rival Boston won the 2004 World Series, the Yanks waited a year and then signed arch-rival, but sliding outfielder Johnny Damon. In what may have amounted to a curse, the team had Damon, Rodriguez, Giambi, and Sheffield on the roster at the same time during and after Pavano went through nearly two years of rehab after signing his own big buck deal.

All of these deals – trades and free agency – came at the expense of a farm system that has just in recent years started again gaining traction. There’s debate about whether or not the Yankees will rebuild from within or strike out heavily into the free agent market to turn things around. Undoubtedly, one way or another, the team will have the resources to do whatever it wants.

But in the long run, in order to return to the glory years, the team needs to realize that it is the Jeters and Riveras, the Pettittes and Jorge Posadas that have been the blood and guts of its championship runs. The most successful Yankees teams of the last two decades have been built from inside the organization with the occasional big name free agent and the solid, need-to-win role player signed as a free agent – NOT the big buck deals like Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi.

Austin Jackson and Phil Hughes should be the Yankees of tomorrow. If not them, then Jeff Marquez and Humberto Sanchez. The Yanks can go sign Mark Teixeira and CC Sabathia if they want. But it’ll be nothing more than breaking the bank to plug a breaking dam. Carl Pavano was an ugly free agent signing, no doubt. But he was nothing more than the most obvious of the huge, damaging shift in philosophy that had the team dominant in the Major Leagues for the better part of a decade.

This year’s failure will cost the city a lot of money and will, at least temporarily strip the team of some of its unbeatable allure. But for the record, if Hank Steinbrenner looks any further than the front office – if he and brother Hal fire Joe Girardi or Brian Cashman – if anyone but the Steinbrenners eat the blame for this regular season failure, it’s nothing but a cop-out on their part.

The front office in the later years under George Steinbrenner caused this mess. Not Carl Pavano.