MLB needs to rejigger the standards for what constitutes an Error.

The Game Room
1

I stopped paying any attention to the “Errors” stat years ago, when it became apparent that at least half of the calls (and non-calls) that I saw were either questionable, or flat-out wrong by any standard except the rulebook’s. A couple examples:

– Errors of judgment: If a should-be routine fly ball is hit to shallow center, but the CF first sprints back a few steps before realizing his mistake and is unable to reach the ball in time, this counts as a hit – preposterous on it’s face. A ball lost in the sun is a more debatable case, but I would still include it.

– Heavens, the ball hit the ground!: A few days ago, during a Mets-Pirates game, a Mets player recorded a bloop base hit into left field with runners on 1st & 2nd. The Bucs’ LF got to the ball and made a very good throw home in an effort to prevent a run from scoring. The throw beat the runner and would have resulted in a pretty easy tag, except that the catcher dropped it. However, since the ball bounced about 5 feet in front of the catcher, the LF was charged with an error for allowing the trailing baserunner to advance to 3rd during the sequence.

Now, it would be a fairly difficult play, so I have no problem with not charging an Error to the catcher, but the LF is even *less *deserving of a demerit. The catcher still should be able to handle the throw most of the time, throwing home was clearly a a good decision, and it’s not exactly fair for the scorekeeper to expect such a long throw to reach its target on the fly as long as it’s otherwise accurate.

– Split errors?: Related somewhat to the above, I think baseball would do well to introduce the concept of allowing players to share an error, much like football allows two players to each record half a sack. Specifically, I’m thinking of semi-difficult throws to 1B that hit the ground. Ok, obviously the ball shouldn’t have hit the ground, but if it’s on line then the First Baseman should still be able to make the play; specifically, it’s the mark of a good one that he will rarely fail to do so. 0.5 errors to both parties? Seems fair to me. This could also be used when two defenders who are going after a fly ball collide, or call each other off.
Thoughts? Criticisms? Other ideas, or ways in which Errors are poorly handled by MLB?

2

Errors have always been a record of opinions.

3

How could it be otherwise? The criterion really can’t be anything other than “He really should have made that play”, and that’s necessarily a matter of judgment.

Per the OP’s last point, it’s already possible to charge multiple errors on the same play, even to the same guy.

4

There’s really no good way to fix it. The way fielding statistics are handled is weird no matter how you slice it.

If we wanna fix something, why on earth are batters charged with making an out when they reach base on an error? It’s senseless. Charging someone with an out that never actually happened is silly, and ignores the very real fact that a fast runner might reach on an error that a slow runner wouldn’t.

Errors worked as a measurement (sort of) in 1880, not so much today. If you have an outfielder with a terrible noodle arm who gives up 45 extra bases on hits a year because everyone knows he can’t throw, that isn’t in his fielding statistics. But a guy with a good arm who makes one throwing error more is charged with being a worse fielder.

5

As others have indicated, this is not cut-and-dried. Start to think of it this way, a team is only allowed to make 27 outs in a 9 inning game. There is no limit on how many runs can be scored. So maybe, just maybe, making an out is more important than allowing a run. What you don’t tell us is how many outs there were when the play was made. Would picking off the guy at third have been the third out and ended the inning? There is a context to all of this. On one hand it would be great if everything was cut-and-dried but on the other hand, that’s what make baseball interesting. There’s always room for argument. That’s also why what is announce as the ruling of the official scorer during the game can be changed upon review after the game. They really do try to get it right.

6

Right, but there are certain informal standards which all scorekeepers use to define an error, and some of them are simply no longer reflective of how the game is played (if they ever were).

Obviously the stat can’t capture the most important parts of being a defender, but there’s no reason that it should do such a bad job measuring the things it CAN capture.

7

And the say, shortstop, with a limited range who lets a lot of balls past him might end up with fewer errors than an average-fielding shortstop who actually puts out a lot more batters. Not that there’s a good prominent example of this in on an internationally-known team or anything.

8

That would only become a true crime against humanity if that team acquired a much better shortstop and he began to play a different position out of deference to the guy who had been there longer.

9

Derek Jeter makes his share of errors. He’s not particularly known for his fielding percentages. A more pertinent example would be Ozzie Smith, those career .978 percentage is well above average but nothing that makes you go “holy crap!” In 1980 he made 24 errors, which is quite a few, but that was the year he also had 621 assists, a record that stands to this day.

Smith was a superlative fielder, maybe the best who ever played at ANY position, but he made his share of errors.

But these days I think most people understand it’s not about errors. the OP’s complaint, I think, is that the definition of “error” is subjective and results in rulings that are clearly sort of strange. My objection is that the way errors are counted results in imbalances and stupidities in the record; it’s theoretically possible for a hitter to go 0-for-4 despite never making a single out, or make four outs and not be blamed for making any outs at all.

10

Rafael Furcal was such a shortstop once–charged with plenty of “errors” for touching or almost touching balls that other players wouldn’t have been near.

What can it capture that isn’t better captured by an objective metric?

11

Bingo. You could scrap the stat entirely at the cost of only occasional holes in anyone’s understanding of a player’s fielding ability. And you’d get rid of the occasional BS such as where a hit is scored as an error in order to keep a no-hitter technically alive.

On the whole, the ruling of an error is a judgment call that really doesn’t need official standing. If it didn’t exist, assorted stat junkies would come up with their own tallies of players’ obvious muffs, and that would do the job just as well as anything official.

12

Getting rid of the error would also impact ERA calculations. This may not be a bad thing, since a pitcher can give up 8 runs after a bases empty 2 out error and not impact his ERA. Sorry, that’s a bad job, I don’t care if the inning should have been over, it isn’t over and you still need to pitch.

13

Gosh, there’s another one.

Jo-Jo Reyes had a game earlier this year where he either gave up one or no earned runs, but actually gave up six, and lost the game. His line suggests he pitched okay, but in actual fact most of the fault was his. Yes, an error was part of the parade of suck, but so was his subsequently lousy pitching and the resulting walks and shrieking line drives.

Similarly, it’s quite possible for a pitcher to have his ERA pushed upwards by lousy fielders. Again, looking at the Jays, the outfield defense is just horrible; Davis, Patterson and Bautista all have speed (Davis has a LOT of speed) but none of them are actually good outfielders, even though they haven’t made many errors - two each for Davis and Bautista and none for Patterson. Davis is very tentative moving in any direction other than his glove side, and Patterson takes terrible routes, and Bautista, while he has an excellent arm, jut doesn’t have the range you’d like to see in an outfielder. But all those fly balls that other teams have caught land for doubles against Toronto, which is charged to a pitcher who on maybe 24 other teams would have gotten an out.

To my mind, if a man hits a ball and ends up on first base that’s a double and should be counted as such even if it bounced off the center fielder’s head. (I know we can’t do this now 'cause it’d screw up comparing batting averages across history, but I can dream.) If you want to ADDITIONALLY find ways to measure “fly balls the guy should have caught but didn’t” then that’s fine too, but as it is the scoring system is an arbitrary system of assigning blame, not measuring what happened.

Errors are also so rare as to be unimportant now in comparing players and teams. This year the average AL team makes 35 errors; the most fumble-fingered team, Texas, has made 45, and the least, Boston, has made 28, which has not stopped Texas from being in first place. And those numbers will likely converge a little.

By comparison, in 1911, the AL’s best fielding team, the A’s, made 130 fewer errors than the worst-fielding team, the Browns, and 74 fewer than average. With their little gloves and shitty fields, the ability to just hold on to the ball was a differentiating skill back then. And even more so back when they came up with the rules; in the NL in 1895 the AVERAGE team made 385 errors, more than any three NL teams combined last year.

14

Among other problems with errors as ERA determinants, they require the scorers to explore absurd counterfactuals which remind me of those GD threads about what if Rome never fell.

“Reconstruct the inning without the errors”, the rule says. Um, OK. If the fielder had made that play, where would he have gotten the out? If there had been a runner on third base, would he have scored on that ground ball? Who knows? Who cares?

And the idea that two outs, then an error, then two walks and a grand slam = zero earned runs is worse than absurd. Why stop the counterfactual at the end of the inning? To my mind, without the error you have three runs given up in the next inning.

Just use runs-against averages and be done with it.