As things go, a dramatic bottom-of-the-ninth rally like that put on by the Yankees last night is a very good thing. At the risk of being churlish, though, it’s hard not to note that the team was digging itself out of a hole it had dug for itself in the first place, and that first baseman Jason Giambi was only cleaning up his own mess when he drove in the winning run against Mets closer Braden Looper.

For the last few years, a fair number of us in the press have been harping on and on about the Yankees’ defense, in particular their outfield defense. Anyone who watches the team with an unbiased eye will testify to its incompetence, and statistics back observation. The 2005 Yankees rank last in the league in defensive efficiency, a simple measure of what percentage balls in play they turn into outs. Turning only 67% of balls in play into outs is not only miserable (compared to the league-leading White Sox, who check in at 72%), but would rank them last in the league for the second time in three years.

There are two ways of looking at the Yankees’ defensive woes. On the one hand, the Yankees have been winning 100 games fairly regularly, which would suggest that if the defense was harming them it wasn’t harming them all that much. On the other, the issue is larger than defense, and goes to the style of baseball the Yankees play and the manner in which the current team was assembled.

As managers since the 19th century have stressed, defense is in large part a matter of preparation, focus, and effort rather than talent. The real complaint, then, about the Yankees’ gaffe-prone ways has to do with their lackadaisical play. What’s more, defensive talent at the positions where the club has lacked it – in center field, for instance, where good defenders like Gary Matthews and Brady Clark are always available for two bits and a phone call – could have been acquired for hardly anything at all. This sheds a damning light on management’s tendency to always settle on the most expensive solution rather than the one that best meets the needs of the team. These are probably the two biggest factors in the Yankees’ inability to win a world championship over the last five years.

During last night’s 5-4 win, and throughout the weekend’s set with the Mets, a problem that has been visible mainly in subtle ways for many years became glaringly obvious and, as Jorge Posada said after Saturday’s game, embarrassing. When Joe Torre made out his lineup card last night, Tony Womack – who is having one of the worst seasons in baseball history at the plate – was in center field. Kevin Reese, a 27-year-old career minor-leaguer who hadn’t done anything particularly noteworthy this year in Triple-A, was in left.

Bernie Williams, who may one day be inducted into the Hall of Fame, was on the bench after two games in which he’d dropped fly balls any decent high-school player would have caught. For years now, Williams has been criticized for his odd routes to balls, weak arm, and occasional lapses of concentration, but this was something else entirely, something unacceptable on a major league team. Torre used the most basic of all the instruments at his disposal – the lineup card – to solve the problem.

It was ironic, then, to witness the Yankees’ play in the bottom of the seventh inning, which was brutal even by the standards of a decent weekend beer league. First, with Chris Woodward on second, Randy Johnson walked Ramon Castro with a pitch that went all the way to the backstop, putting Woodward on third. During the next at bat, Johnson induced a ground ball which Robinson Cano promptly booted, scoring Woodward and putting Marlon Anderson on first.

After Tom Gordon came in and threw three straight balls to Jose Reyes (a feat in itself), a dribbler up the first-base line somehow turned into two runs: Gordon and Giambi couldn’t decide how to cover the bag at first base, leaving Reyes safe at first and Castro safe at home. Worse, Giambi’s poor flip to first went over Gordon’s head, and the reliever threw home after chasing the ball down the line. To complete the comedy of errors, Posada was unable to field Gordon’s bad throw, allowing Anderson to score and Reyes to move to second.

This was quite the concerto of incompetence, all of it more or less preventable. Ace pitchers should not throw wild pitches. Second basemen should not make errors on routine ground balls, and first basemen should be able to handle them if they do. Dominant set-up men and starting first basemen should know by June who covers first base on balls up the line. First basemen should be able to throw the ball to the catcher. These are matters of practice and repetition, not talent or skill.

This is what is particularly galling about the Yankees’ sloppy play. For years, the team was praised for its unwillingness to give up outs at the plate. Hitters like Paul O’Neill, Chuck Knoblauch, and Tino Martinez were renowned for their ability to lay off and foul off good pitches until they saw the ones they wanted to hit. Less noted but equally important, the team generally didn’t give up outs in the field, either.

In 1998, Torre had Williams and O’Neill, both good defenders at the time, as regulars in center and right; with a left-field situation equally as unsettled as the present one, he could choose from among Chad Curtis and Ricky Ledee – both competent center fielders – and Tim Raines, a truly great player in his day who, at 38, still held his own in the field due to hustle and smarts. The sort of attention to detail Raines exemplified through his career is very rare on today’s Yankees, and the managerial savvy it took to acquire him in the first place is entirely lacking. It is, in a word, embarrassing.