I was wondering why errors is always the third stat given in a box score as in: 4 runs, 6 hits, and 1 error. My basic question is why is it that errors gets to be the third statistic that is readily displayed on the scoreboard next to runs and hits. Why not home runs or something? Runs, hits, and strikeouts or something. What is the deal?
Well, it’s not homeruns, because they’re kind of represented by the Runs column. And it’s not strikeouts, because the scoreboard is more or less for the offense, not the defense. After all, you don’t keep as close of a watch on putouts or chances. Strikeouts have their own little column, anyway, in the pitcher’s line further down the boxscore.
Now, then there’s the errors. Why them? Well, the scoreboard represents how the team has done. You can’t put strikeouts, because each SO means more as an individual pitching stat than it does as a team stat (you never see something like “The Dodgers struck out 16 batters yesterday.”) Same with homers and other offense numbers.
The runs are the most important, because they obviously determine who wins. The hits are important because they can indicate further how well the team performed offensively. And the errors are important because they indicate how well the team performed defensively.
Ya know, I always wondered that too. They give 2 offensive stats then a defensive stat. It seems that if they’re gonna put every way a team got on base, they’d include walks too, like you said.
Walks would probably be a much more important stat today, but this habit of reporting runs, hits, and errors goes back to a time when errors were much more common than they are today. You had choppy infield dirt with rocks in it, and unevenly mowed grass, and a ball that wasn’t replaced often, and gloves that were nowhere near as efficient or large as today’s models are. So there were a lot more errors, and you could easily score three runs, shall we say, on two hits and three errors. Today, in the majors at least, errors are far less common, so the R-H-E is kind of an anachronism; but in the early days of the game it made a good deal of sense. [You can still see some of the same sort of play in the very low minor leagues; I attended a short-season A game last year in which one team made seven errors. THAT’S a case for reporting runs, hits, and errors, all right.]
Errors are a remnant of a bygone day in baseball when men played without gloves and the infields weren’t groomed every five innings. They happened a lot.
In 1903, the Cleveland shortstop John Gochnauer made 98 errors in 134 games. He also batted .185 that year.
He was not invited back to play in the Majors again.
Honus Wagner, the A-Rod of the early 20th Century, had a 60 error season in 1905 and several other seasons over 50.
In 1990, Cal Ripken made 3 errors in 161 games at shortstop.
Baseball does like to stand on tradition.
I think we’re missing the entire point of why errors are recorded in the first place. Errors are recorded to explain the advancement of a runner when nothing else would explain it. If a batter gets a hit, that’s a stat. If he steals 2nd, that’s a stat. But if the next batter gets to first on an infield single and the runner on second scores on it due to a misplay by an infielder, how do you exlpain his getting from 2nd to home? You record the error.
Keep in mind that the line score in the paper is just a reporting of the line score from the game’s scoreboard itself. If your attention wanders during the game, or you have to see a man about a dog, and you come back and there’s a runner on second, you might ask yourself, “Oh, did they get a hit?” So you look to the scoreboard and see, no, they didn’t get a hit, the other team committed an error. You’re back up to speed.
A line score in the paper which only reported runs and hits, say:
would only tell you that the visiting team was better at generating runs off of their meager hits that day. But a line score with runs, hits and errors:
would give you a better impression of which team really was the better team all-around on that day. In this case, the home team not only couldn’t drive in runs after getting men on base, but they were also not doing well defensively, which might explain why the visitors got 4 runs on only 2 hits.
An individual player is charged with the error and it goes on his individual stats, since there is not yet any such thing as a “team error” in baseball. But it still gets reported in the line score way in the box score because it tends to shed the most light on the outcome of the game.
…and he didn’t even win the Gold Glove that year.
BobT sort of hit on this, but let me elaborate:
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Errors are displayed out of tradition; it’s been done that way for a century or more.
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They were done that way before because they MATTERED. In the early days of baseball it was perfectly common for teams to make 3, 4, 5 or more errors a game.
Today it’s very rare for errors to be the critical part of a game. In most games both teams will make one error, or one team will make one and the other will make none. It’s very unusual now for a team to make more than two errors in a game. So displaying them does seem pointless.
But 80 years ago, errors were commonplace, so you’d often have games where one team made two errors and the other team made six. Errors were a BIG part of baseball then and had a big influence on winning and losing.