They have become the story of this young baseball season.

Yes, the Red Sox are off to a great start. But the Yankees’ slow start is the truly surprising thing, what no one expected.

And win or lose, the Yankees are always the best theater in baseball, thanks to their storied history, the city they play in, the pinstripes, the palace intrigue that’s always defined the George Steinbrenner Era, the tabloid culture they are so much a product of, all of it.

So it is again.

And it’s more than the fact that they are under .500 as we approach Memorial Day, the symbolic quarter pole of the baseball season. Or that the soap opera has been going full throttle for a month, the speculation about Joe Torre’s future, the speculation about Brian Cashman’s future, the speculation, period.

It’s the fact the Yankees’ starting pitching has been a baseball version of community auditions, a victim of age and injuries. Or who is Tyler Clippard, anyway? It’s the fact that the bullpen is a disaster area, a collection of flotsam and jetsam that no one seems to have a lot of faith in, Torre included. And that’s not even talking about Mariano Rivera, now in the twilight of his great career.

It’s the suspicion that too many Yankees are on the back nine of their careers, the suspicion that this is simply a team with too many flaws, one with not enough pitching and not enough of a bench, a poorly constructed team, even with its $200-million payroll.

And no one should be surprised.

Think of it this way: If you took away the pinstripes and the mystique, took away the history and the amount of money spent on payroll, would anyone be in awe of this particular team? Would anyone right now be thinking of them as a great team?

In fact, it was two years ago that Buster Olney, who covered the Yankees for five years, wrote The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, a book whose premise was that the Yankees already were a very different team than the one that lost in the 2001 World Series to Arizona, that we were seeing the last days of the dynasty, like the morning after the party, just the stragglers and the empty bottles left.

It was Olney’s contention that the glory days had been built on a foundation of great pitching and a core of players who had all come of age together, a core whose whole was greater than the sum of the parts. In short, it was a team with a shared purpose, run by a manager who both trusted his players and had their respect.

But all of that was gone now, as the Yankees tried to buy the future with a succession of free agents. To the point they began to resemble more of an all-star team than a team that had grown up together, some who bought into the team’s ethos, some who didn’t. All in an environment that had no patience with anything other than winning world championships, everyone from the owner, to the fans, to the tabloids that screamed out every morning with their big bold headlines.

“The others in the Yankee clubhouse had inherited the legacy, and like second-generation scions, they found that everything they did was held up against the daunting standard of years before,” wrote Olney. “The burden of those expectations weighed on the team, especially the newcomers.”

It was Olney’s contention that what we were seeing in 2004 was the dynasty’s last gasp, an attempt to cling to something that was already gone.

Now it’s three years later, and it’s only more so.

You can see that in all reports coming out of New York like dispatches from some losing war. The observation that this has become a passionless team, a team that’s forgotten how to win. The theory that all of the off-the-field drama has taken its toll, each game a referendum, the pressure ratcheting up, even though it’s not even June yet. Every day a different theory.

This is what happens when the Red Sox are on the verge of running away from you, what happens when you’re below .500, what happens when the season is starting to get away from you. This is what happens when you’re the Yankees and things are not going well.

There’s little question that the Yankees are constructed differently than they were when they won four World Series in five years, back when their great pitching put its great imprint all over games. Now, the talk is of outhitting everyone, a lineup that’s supposed to put up enough runs on the scorecards to take pressure off a questionable pitching staff. You don’t have to be the reincarnation of Casey Stengel to know it’s now a very different game plan.

And, yes, it’s still only May, still a lot of baseball to be played. And, yes, history tells us that pennants are not won in the spring. And, yes, recent history also tells us that the only thing that matters is getting into the playoffs, not divisional titles. Yes, this all could look very different in October.

Still, it all seems different, and it’s not just the Red Sox off to a great start. It’s a Yankee team that looks very flawed for $200 million.

Olney wrote a new epilogue for the paperback version of The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, one that ends with a seething Derek Jeter sitting in front of his locker after the Yankees had lost the ALCS to the Red Sox in 2004, the team’s collapse being the worst in postseason history.

“It’s not the same team. I’ve said that before,” Jeter said sharply. “It’s not the same team.”

No, it’s not.

Not then.

And certainly not now.

breynold@projo.com