New York ? Understand this, Don Mattingly: You will never succeed as the Yankees manager.

The same goes for you, Joe Girardi, and you, Tony Pena, and Bobby Valentine, Buck Showalter, Jim Leyland, and anyone else who has been or might ever be considered for the job.

And it goes for Derek Jeter, if in some future life in an alternate universe, the Captain decides to become the Skipper.

You may succeed according to your standards and you may even satisfy the ravenous, many-headed beast known as the Yankees’ fan base. But you will never make your owner happy, and you are guaranteed to leave the job a disillusioned and perhaps bitter man.

One need not consult a crystal ball to come up with such a dire prophecy. There’s no need to gaze into the future to know what awaits the next Yankees manager, just a look back at the past.

This is a story that never has a happy ending and a job for which there is no real thanks.

You look at Joe Torre’s legacy and you wonder, “If that doesn’t meet the criteria of a successful managerial tenure, then what does?”

The answer, of course, is that with the Yankees, nothing does. And never will.

It makes you wonder how anyone could want the job. And it makes you understand a little better why Mattingly sounded so reticent last week about taking it. He, after all, has seen the Bronx at its chaotic best. In his 13 seasons, Mattingly played for seven different managers.

As a rookie, he played for Billy Martin. A year later, it was Yogi Berra.

Then Berra and Martin in the same year, followed by Lou Piniella for two, then Martin again, who gave way after 68 games in 1988 for Piniella. The next year, it was Dallas Green and Bucky Dent, then Dent and Stump Merrill, then Merrill alone, followed by the relative stability of four years of Buck Showalter.

Torre’s 12 year-stint doesn’t change the reality that the only guarantees for a Yankees manager are that no matter how many games he wins, no matter how many championships he brings home, no matter how much playoff revenue his clubs generate by routinely playing into October, there will come a point when ownership will tire of his face and his voice, when his tactics will be picked apart and questioned by men who are masters not of the cut fastball but the cut paycheck, when his accomplishments will be denigrated, his personality criticized, his loyalty impugned.

Then, he will be fired.

It has happened time and again, and will happen to Mattingly, too, and won’t that be a happy chapter in Yankees history when Donnie Baseball no longer wants anything to do with the team, or the team with him?

In fact, throughout the team’s history, the only manager to have left on his own terms was Miller Huggins, who dropped dead 11 games before the end of the 1929 season.

Since the Yankees finished 18 games out of first place that year, Huggins may well have accomplished a most unique method of beating the Yankees to the punch.