BOSTON – The most valuable member of the Yankees traveling party slipped unnoticed into a back trainer’s room at Fenway Park yesterday, earlier than just about anyone else. He fired up a laptop computer and went to work: studying, tinkering, fiddling, thinking, calculating.

“You don’t ever do anything differently,” Mel Stottlemyre said. “It’s always about working hard and being prepared, and if you do that everything will take care of itself.”

And, if you are Mel Stottlemyre, coming to the end of your ninth and finest season as the Yankees pitching coach, you take care of everything else that hard work and patience don’t. You coddle and cajole and counsel, and you cobble together a starting pitching staff out of dust.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Stottlemyre said. “We have some accomplished pitchers on this staff, guys who know how to win. Jon Lieber, he won 20 games in the big leagues. Kevin Brown knows what he’s doing up here, Javy Vazquez, El Duque. It’s not like you don’t have anything to work with.”

It’s easy enough to say that now, this morning, with the Yankees already halfway to their 40th American League pennant, with the way their starting pitchers have strung together one terrific outing after another. Yet it was only 10 days ago, at the outset of these playoffs, that the whole baseball world wondered how the Yankees were ever going to get anybody out.

“I heard that,” Stottlemyre said. “But I didn’t believe it.”

Neither, it would seem, have his pitchers. Not that any of Stottlemyre’s pitchers have ever much cared what outsiders say. Once they become members of good standing within the Province of Mel, they feel they can tackle the world, sometimes quite literally.

“That man,” Roger Clemens said last October, nodding in Stottlemyre’s direction, “is a genius.”

Pitching coaches are rarely called geniuses. Mostly, they are lightning rods. Mostly, they’re the first casualties when things go astray in a season, the first slab of meat thrown to the angry, hungry masses. Stottlemyre may not get that treatment from Yankees fans, but he does get it, quite often, from the suits above him on the Yankee food chain, who too often entrust the struggles of youngsters or newcomers to the eyes and philosophies of Tampa.

Why that is, nobody has ever been able to clarify for certain.

Especially because, in a results-driven industry, Stottlemyre has always produced. The Mets had the best staff or arms in the business during the years Stottlemure worked at Shea. And the Yankees have consistently received the best of their pitchers whenever Stottlemyre has been given the chance to work with them in his way.

And his way works. Maybe it seemed an easier task when the rotation was comprised of names like Clemens, Pettitte and Wells. Maybe it still looks easy when you add names like Mussina and Brown and Hernandez. If so, why did everyone think less than two weeks ago that it would take a beautiful mind to figure this all out for the Yankees?

“Mel always does a great job,” Joe Torre said yesterday. “The thing about Mel is, he never sits there and wishes we had something we don’t have or somebody healthier than they are. He’s steady. I trust him. He gives those pitchers that confidence that they can accomplish something, with a little bit of a rough edge, letting them know how tough it is and not to take anything for granted.”

They’ve been just as tough as their pitching coach. Mike Mussina and Jon Lieber had to listen for two days about how overmatched they would be against Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez. So all Mussina did was pitch 61/3perfect innings. All Lieber did was allow one run in 7-plus innings to the best offense in baseball.

“He could be doing his best job this year,” Torre said.

The results, they say something else. They say you can delete the “could” from that assessment.