One of the many reasons to love baseball is that there is almost no visible difference between the best and the worst player in the league.

Imagine for a moment a fan who loved the game but had spent the last seven years working as a fisherman in Alaska, with no newspapers, television, or Internet access, going to Yankee Stadium yesterday and trying to pick out who were the best players on the field using only visual evidence.

Would he be able to tell, just by watching the way they delivered the ball, that Freddy Garcia is a very good pitcher and that Aaron Small is the definition of a journeyman, or that Mariano Rivera is a Hall of Fame reliever while Dustin Hermanson is a guy with bad facial hair having the best run of his career? Probably not, but yesterday in the Bronx, there wasn’t much difference between Chicago’s Garcia and the Yankees’ Small – each allowed one run, Garcia in eight innings and Small in seven.

The big difference between Hermanson and Rivera is that Hermanson closed the door on the Yankees while Rivera was tagged with a loss. Baseball is a game in which differences generally matter over long periods of time; in any at-bat, game, series, or year, any undistinguished player can do absolutely anything, and, judging from a small sample, it’s almost impossible to tell who’s for real and who’s not.

Even our hypothetical observer, though, while enjoying the contrast between the cold climes of Alaska and the balmy breezes of the Bronx in August, would have been able to tell just how far Bernie Williams has fallen from grace in center field.

When slap-hitting shortstop Juan Uribe took Rivera the other way in the 10th inning, he slowed down as he rounded first, seemingly sure that he’d just hit a routine double. The ball, of course, managed to sail past Williams into the depths of center field, then to rattle around there and in Williams’s glove while Uribe paused to appraise the situation and decided to run, ending up at third base. He would eventually score the winning run from there on an infield grounder by the next batter, Scott Podsednik.

Everyone knows how bad Williams is at this point, but it’s incredible to see a key weakness so visibly affect the outcome of a game. Tony Womack is horrible with the bat, for instance, but you don’t point to individual bad Womack at-bats as the reason for particular losses. In Williams’s case, this is no longer so; the large, abstract weakness that is the Yankees’ outfield defense is also a visible and glaring one that anyone can see affecting the course of games and the course of the season.

Yesterday was the second consecutive game the Yankees lost 2-1 to the White Sox, the best team in the American League, and it’s tempting to use those losses as a cudgel with which to beat the Yanks for the poor fundamentals they’ve displayed all year. Certainly, despite all their offensive firepower, the Yankees suffer in comparison to the Sox, who may not be an especially talented team, but whose aggressive and sound play seems all the more refreshing when set next to that of Joe Torre’s rather lethargic and often sloppy charges.

If you wanted an image of the White Sox, it would be of center fielder Aaron Rowand easily gliding over the outfield grass and plucking a liner out of the air; the matching Yankee image would be of Williams stumbling around in the same patch of grass, allowing the runner representing the winning run to reach third.

Honestly, these two games said as much about the Sox’s failings as those of the Yankees. While Small and Shawn Chacon – who allowed one run in seven innings to Chicago on Tuesday – have pitched admirably, any team that scores two runs off these two in 14 innings has some problems with its offense. The Yankees could, and should, have won both of these games. That they didn’t probably has less to do with poor fundamentals, or the good fundamentals of the Sox, than with bad luck, like that of Uribe’s liner going for a triple.

Still, that’s luck the Yankees made when they chose not to get a center fielder capable of catching the ball, and it’s hard to feel too sorry for them at this point.

Yesterday’s loss put the Yankees 5 1/2 games out of first place and four games out of the wild card lead with two teams ahead of them. It’s becoming rather unlikely that they’re going to make the playoffs, and the last two games are emblematic as to why they are not bound for the postseason.

You can point to the small things, like supposed clutch god Derek Jeter failing to bring in the tying run in the 10th inning yesterday, or the bizarre specter of Alan Embree pitching to Paul Konerko in the top of the ninth in Tuesday’s game, predictably resulting in a desperately needed insurance run for the Pale Hose, but it’s not really fair to peg these games, or the season, on the routine failures of players in key situations.

The larger failure is the team’s inability to capitalize on good fortune. We’ve heard so much about the bad luck this team has had, what with having to use 26 different pitchers and so forth, that it’s almost unbelievable how much freakish good luck they’ve had.

Time and again the Yankees have looked like a lost team this season, and then they’ve pulled back into the race out of nowhere with a well-timed winning streak, only to again slip back into mediocrity.

On the level of individual players, Tino Martinez and Jason Giambi each decide to take a turn imitating Lou Gehrig, Alex Rodriguez has the best season of his career, Al Leiter proves to have a bit of gas left in his tank, and none of it really makes a difference. Chacon and Small, of all people, each pitch absolute gems against the best team in the league, and the Yanks can find no way to take advantage of it.

How is this even possible? The answer is the same as it has been all year long. The blind arrogance that led the Yankees to field an entire rotation of injury-prone starters, and to not field a center fielder, has finally come back to haunt them.

You can see it on the field without looking hard at all.