Stat of the Day: The Error

According to baseball writer Bill James, the “error” is one of the most useless and misleading statistics in baseball. “It’s a moral judgment” he says, “you have to do something right to get an error; even if the ball is right at you, then you were standing in the right place to begin with”. I don’t disagree with him. An outfielder could get a great break on a ball, take the right angle towards it, and get within an arm’s reach of a well-hit fly ball. If it bounces off his glove, he gets an error. On the other hand, if an outfielder does not judge the trajectory of the ball correctly, he ends up taking one step forward, one back, then sprints forward, only to slide and miss a shoestring catch that ends up as a triple, he’s off the hook. Who would you rather have? The one who can determine the path of the ball exquisitely but occasionally drops a can-a-corn, or the one who reliably has to field the ball on a bounce because he has no idea where it’s going when it leaves the bat? I’ll take the former any day of the week. To prove that simply watching a player cannot accurately judge his defensive prowess, he tells you to think about this: “If [the batter] hits a smash down the line and the third baseman makes a diving stop and throws the runner out, then we notice and applaud the third baseman. But until the smash is hit, who is watching the third baseman? If he anticipates, if he adjusts for the hitter and moves over just two steps, then the same smash is a routine backhand stop—and nobody applauds”. I do think errors are an important statistic, but by no means do they tell you all you need to know about a player’s defensive ability. Here’s some stats to look at.

Since 1995, Derek Jeter has committed the most errors of any player. In that time, he’s won three Gold Gloves. Craig Biggio has the most errors of any second basemen in that time—he has four Gold Gloves to his name. Since 1999, the four top error-committers have been shortstops. By no means does that mean they are poor fielders. On the contrary, shortstop is where managers like to play their best defensive players. They commit so many “errors” because they can get to many more balls and have so many chances to commit an “error” than any other fielder. Brandon Inge and David Wright, two of the most amazing fielders in the game (Web Gems, anyone?) are two of the worst thirty defensive players in the MLB, according to the error stat.

In case you’re wondering, this Bill James character invented his own statistic that he feels measures a player’s defensive ability more accurately. It’s called the range factor: (putouts + assists) ÷ innings played. Instead of counting the number of mistakes a position player made, it counts all the successful plays made in the field and does not penalize a player for dropping a ball he might have made a great play just to get to.