More than any other team, theYankees trumpet these ideals, eagerly promoting an idealized version of what they want to represent. Signs with stark messages — “accountability,” for one — line the walls of their clubhouse in spring training, as if the world’s best players need to be reminded to never give up.

The Yankees do not always meet their standards, of course; their history is littered with stars who had terrible off-field vices. But when a player commits an egregious and obvious offense, he does not always get away with it. AskJorge Posada.

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It seems pretty clear that Posada badly wanted the Yankees to cover for him after he refused to bat ninth on Saturday’s nationally televised game against the Boston Red Sox. He was dismayed that General Manager Brian Cashmantalked about him on the broadcast.

“That’s the way he works now, I guess,” Posada said on Saturday. “Now” was the telling word.

Cashman has been more visible since the death of George Steinbrenner — scaling a skyscraper dressed as Santa’s elf, tending bar for charity while wearing a wig — and more transparent. And he is not afraid to hurt players’ feelings by saying what he really feels.

Fans should be thankful for that. Candor is a good thing, even in a tricky case like this, when the Yankees surely irked their captain, Derek Jeter, by making public their disapproval of his comments Sunday night.

Jeter supported Posada, which was no surprise considering their long friendship. Jeter said Posada was like a brother to him, a significant statement for Jeter, who has a sister and no other siblings. Yet by offering support, and saying that Posada did not need to apologize, Jeter was tacitly condoning his refusal to play.

“I ain’t lying to you,” Jeter said. “If I thought he did something wrong, I would tell him.”

Maybe, by now, Jeter has. The Yankees’ top executives — the general partner Hal Steinbrenner, the president Randy Levine and Cashman — summoned Jeter to a conference call on Monday. They did not offer details of the conversation, but they presumably told Jeter everything they knew about what Posada did.

Jeter did not reiterate his support for Posada when he spoke with reporters Monday at Tropicana Field. He stuck to a single talking point, insisting over and over that everybody was on the same page. At last, that appears to be true.

Posada has sincerely apologized, the Yankees chose not to discipline him, and he remains on the roster — unlike Raul Mondesi, who quit on the team during a game in 2003 and was traded immediately.

As for Jeter, he got another lesson in the Yankees’ expectations for him as captain. It is well known that the Yankees wished Jeter had supported Alex Rodriguez when fans booed him in 2006. This time, too much support — without all the facts — was the problem.

The easier path, certainly, would have been for the Yankees to alibi for Posada from the start and hope that nobody leaked what really happened, that Posada simply quit on the team for a day. But the truth would have probably come out anyway.

The Yankees could have publicly ignored Jeter’s all-is-well stance on Sunday. But to do so would have let his words hang there as the official record of the Yankee captain’s stance on quitting. And if the captain were to condone a player bailing on his teammates and fans ... well, then what?

Then nothing, probably. It is all symbolic. It is easy, in a way, to take the moral high ground against a player hitting .165. But the Yankees still did it, when they could have covered everything up.

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They were not afraid of further angering Posada, because they knew he was wrong — and, ultimately, he knew it, too. And they were not afraid of taking on Jeter, who clearly gave up his bulletproof status when he signed his new contract last off-season.

It was all to prove a point: that a player cannot quit on his team and expect the team to pretend everything is fine. It was a teaching moment for everybody, from aspiring young players to veterans like Posada and Jeter. Someone, it turns out, actually reads those hokey signs in spring training.