In 2005, it took five or six runs to win the average baseball game. In Game 2 of the Yankees’ ALDS series with the Angels on Wednesday night, the Bombers scored three. In the end, that was really all that mattered. Though Chien-Ming Wang carried a 2-1 lead into the bottom of the sixth, what followed was almost inevitable: an error, a ground out to advance the runner, a single to center field.

The next inning was worse, with Wang undone by a couple of balls that barely made it past the pitcher’s mound. The Yankees don’t play 2-1 games. The bats failed on Wednesday, not the pitching.

This season, the Yankees played 19 games in which they were held to three runs. They went 3-16. Once the Yankees failed to do any real damage to John Lackey – this despite five walks and five hits in 5 2/3 innings – the outcome of the game was preordained. Lackey is a good pitcher. The Angels’ relievers are better than him. This year, the Angels went 15-5 when they scored five runs. On Wednesday night, the Yankees saw why.

It was ironic that so much of what happened in the game was due to defensive miscues and plays that didn’t quite happen. The Yankees were one of the worst defensive teams in baseball this year, while the Angels were one of the best. The Halos allowed fewer runs on errors than any other team, while converting 70% of balls in play into outs. The Yankees ranked in the bottom third of the league in both categories, allowing 63 runs on errors (enough to swing approximately six games from the win column to the loss column) while getting outs on 69% of balls in play. That 1% difference between the teams’ defensive efficiency doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but over the course of a long season, it adds up.

Of course, good pitching is at the heart of run prevention. The Yankees got some in Game 2. As a groundball pitcher who gets few strikeouts, Wang is more dependent on the defense than the typical hurler. When Randy Johnson punches out a batter on a high fastball, all the defense has to do is watch. In Wang’s case, one of the five infielders (Wang being the fifth) has to make a play, or the runner reaches. Wang the pitcher did his job last night, inducing 16 ground outs and just four fly outs. Wang the defender had a key error, as did the normally reliable Alex Rodriguez.

All of this is a way of saying that should the Yankees find a way to sign the 2005-06 versions of Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright this off-season – and they will try very hard to do just that no matter who the general manager is – they will need to remember that Wang is a very good young pitcher whose overall efficiency is going to be disguised by the quality of the gloves behind him. He should not be bypassed.

Al Leiter probably should be bypassed, and Scott Proctor too, though Proctor at least got through his one third of an inning on Wednesday unscathed. Joe Torre went into this series insisting that the way to beat the Angels is to create matchups with pitching. Whether that’s true is debatable. The real problem is that even if it is true, the Yankees don’t have the personnel to follow Torre’s program.

The managerial tactic of bringing in lefty short men to face the other team’s lefty hitters is foolhardy at the best of times (the lefty short man usually isn’t very good, and the opposing manager then neuters him by pinch-hitting with a righty). It’s doubly so for the Yankees, who don’t have a lefty short man. Nor do they have a lefty long man. Unless the Big Unit is on the mound, the word “lefty” should not even be part of the Yankees’ vocabulary.

That the manager would insist on using Leiter to try to create matchups is what is commonly referred to as denial. Managers and coaches do this all the time. It’s very visible in football. A new coach is hired and immediately proclaims that his team will be running the West Coast Offense, which would be fine if his team’s quarterback wasn’t an immobile pocket passer whose main skill is hauling the ball downfield 40 yards at a time. In the new coach’s first year, the team goes 3-11 as he struggles to make a roster of round pegs fit into square holes that exist only in his imagination. The following year, the team gets a new quarterback and things slowly improve.

In New York’s case, the Yankees have two good relievers: Tom Gordon and Mariano Rivera. In a five-game series, there is no tomorrow. There is no saving the pitcher. This was especially true on Wednesday night. The series would break for travel on Thursday, meaning that Torre had a free pass to use his two best pitchers to keep a tight game close. Instead, he saved them for a lead that never came.

Leiter turned a 4-2 deficit into a 5-2 deficit, which had the effect of making Jorge Posada’s ninth-inning home run off of Francisco Rodriguez a moot point. At some point before this season finally ends, the Yankees manager must stop trying to force these lefty plumbers into roles in which they cannot succeed.

The series is now a best of three, and in that sense the Yankees have the home-field advantage. They will prevail if they do something they’ve done all year, hit, stop doing something they’ve done all year, dream about lefties, and just concentrate on exploiting the advantages they do have.

Mr. Goldman is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.