There has been a lot of talk on the airwaves in recent days about the Yankees struggling in the clutch. They would be winning, this theory goes, if they could only get the big hit. The only problem is, it’s not true.

The average American League hitter is batting .272 AVG/.348 OBA/.414 SLG with runners on base. The Yankees are right there with them at .278/.346/.425. Many Yankees, in fact most of them, are hitting quite well with runners on, including Bobby Abreu at .350, Hideki Matsui at .348, Johnny Damon at .323, Derek Jeter at .318, and Alex Rodriguez at .309. Even Melky Cabrera, streaky in the best of times, is hitting .297 with ducks on the pond.

The Yankees are also getting sacrifice flies in 11% of their plate appearances with a runner on third and less than two outs. That’s a little below the league average of 13%, but the Yankees are also hitting .360 in such situations, better than the league average of .341. This means that sometimes, when the typical batter is flying out to drive in a run, the Yankees are getting a hit. As much as some commentators foolishly like to praise “productive outs,” an out is never preferable to a hit.

At their heart, the team’s offensive shortcomings — which have held the club to middle-of-the road scoring results, not enough to compensate for the starting rotation’s bipolar problems of youth and age — cannot be isolated in any single aspect of hitting. The problems are inherent in the current Yankees lineup. It’s not that they’re having trouble hitting with men on base, it’s that they’re having trouble getting men on base. This year, the average American League team has had 1,006 plate appearances with men on base. The Yankees had only 999 through Tuesday. That may not seem like a huge shortfall, but we’re only talking about the average team. The best offenses have had more, and given the weaknesses of the pitching staff, the Yankees need to be an above-average offense. What they’re finding out, though, is that you can’t drive in runners who aren’t there.

The difference between a great hitting attack and a weak one can be as small as one hitter. Employing even one hitter who falls below replacement level can seriously disrupt an offense’s ability to sustain rallies and put crooked numbers of the scoreboard. The Yankees have two. For this sorry state of affairs you can blame Jorge Posada and Robinson Cano.

Including Posada in the bill of indictment is, of course, completely unfair. It’s not his fault he got hurt, yet the timing was perfect in the sense that it graphically illustrated why the Yankees felt obligated to give a 36-year-old catcher a four-year contract last November: The falloff from Posada, even an aging version of Posada, to anyone else the Yankees might reasonably be expected to acquire, was like a fall off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Like cliff-diving off the Empire State Building. Like Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In Jose Molina, the Yankees found the hitter who greets you at the end of that fall, right before everything goes black. At .211/.222/.307 at the start of last night’s game, Molina ranks as the eighth-best suicide weapon in the American League. For all his supposed defensive attributes, at bat, he’s the baseball equivalent of hugging a hand grenade to your chest. It’s hard to blame general manager Brian Cashman for this, because reserve catchers who can hit even a little are hard to come by. Only a few teams have them — the Rays have Shawn Riggins, the Mets have Ramon Castro, the Jays have Rod Barajas, and the Phillies have Chris Coste — and most Yankees backup backstops of recent vintage have been even worse than Molina. Still, the decision to accept passively Molina’s expert out-making during Posada’s long sabbatical cost the Yankees dearly.

The Yankees also possess the league’s second-best kamikaze in second baseman Cano. He has always been a feast-or-famine hitter: Because he does not walk and only hits the occasional home run, when he fails to hit for average he loses all positive value at the plate. You can compare him to Jason Giambi, who spent a good part of the season hitting under .200 but had enough walks and home runs to still be a valuable contributor. That Cano slumped is not shocking. That he has gone back into a slump after seeming to emerge in May from April’s malaise is troubling. Cano has made more outs than any other Yankee, and the team has little to show for them.

Posada’s return to the lineup this week should alleviate the Molina half of the problem, but only Cano can stop having weak hacks in one-pitch at bats. Until he awakes from this nightmare season, efforts to improve the team’s attack, and thereby save the season, will probably be fruitless.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.