The error in baseball is a unique phenomenon in sports—a judgment of the
quality of play that makes no difference to the outcome. No other sport,
not even a close cousin like cricket, has anything like it. Records of
errors are as old as official scoring; the rulebook devotes as many
pages to the error as it does to equipment. At each of the 2,430 games played this past season, official scorers,
nestled in the press boxes, have devoted considerable intellectual
energy and an elaborate casuistry to working out which plays are errors
and which aren’t. The statistic’s sublime pointlessness is pure
baseball.

“It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports which is a
record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished,” Bill
James, the father of sabermetrics, wrote in his “1977 Baseball Abstract.” “It’s a moral judgment, really.” James, supremely
utilitarian, regarded the moral dimension of the error as a failing; it
didn’t capture the nuances of what had really occurred on the field. And
James was right: as a metric, the error is more or less completely
useless.

For baseball, it doesn’t just matter what events transpire but how they
transpire. Take one of the most famous errors in history—the ball
trickling through Boston Red Sox first baseman Billy Buckner’s legs in
the ninth inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, on a slow grounder
by Mookie Wilson, of the New York Mets. Had Wilson hit the ball harder or
a little to the left—if it had been registered as a hit rather than an
advance on an error—the result of the game would not have changed. But
baseball’s institutions, not just the fans, consider it essential to
record that the game wasn’t won. It was lost. A game without a record of
its errors would feel half-forgotten. Just because a statistic is
useless doesn’t mean that it’s meaningless.

To enter the world of baseball’s official rulings on the error is to
place yourself at the center of sprawling garden labyrinth; it can take
days to think your way out. Section 9.12 of Major League Baseball’s
Official Baseball Rules begins simply enough:

Notice how the rule, even in its simplest iteration, contains an
immediate exception to itself: the fielder who deliberately permits a
foul ball. It’s like beginning the statute on robbery by providing a
quick example of an act that isn’t robbery.

The comment that follows the rule—baseball rules include commentary,
just like the Talmud—confuses rather than clarifies. Slow hands, mental
mistakes, and miscommunication between players cannot cause errors. The
scorer must believe “the fielder could have handled the ball with
ordinary effort.” But how do you define “ordinary effort”? Stephen
Utter, a former official scorer for ten years for the Toronto Blue Jays,
believes the epistemology of ordinary effort emerges from experience.
“You got to see a lot of it to say what is ordinary,” he told me. One of
the most charming features of baseball is that there are certain plays
that anyone should be able to make, catches a twelve-year-old boy should
be able to field. Those ones are obvious. But the definition of
“ordinary effort” surely has to be expanded at the élite level. “These
are the big boys, these are the professionals, they are supposed to be
making plays,” Utter said.

In practice, “ordinary effort” describes, as Bill James wrote, what
should have happened. What should have happened in a piece of fielding
can have nothing to do with the play of the fielder. Utter offered me a
case: The runner hits the ball into the outfield, the fielder bobbles
the ball, and the runner advances to second. Is that an error? It
depends. “What we would have to look at is—is it a single or is it a
double? Or is it a single and advance on an error or on the throw?” The
way that the scorer determines whether that bobble is an error or not
has less to do with the action of the fielder than with the action of
the runner. “Was the runner going all the time? Did he never think about
stopping at first? Or was he running and looking at the play and then
slowed down a little bit and then took off when he saw the little
bobble?” If he paused, noticed the misplay, and ran to second, “That
becomes the error.”

It’s like the spooky action at a distance in quantum mechanics: another
player’s movement determines the meaning of the fielder’s action. And so
far we have really only approached the most basic aspects of the error
rule. Rule 9.12 (a)(7) opens a whole other wing to the maze:

Errors can happen by accident rather than misplay, and the comment on
the rule makes its own unfairness explicit: “The official scorer shall
apply this rule even when it appears to be an injustice to a fielder
whose throw was accurate.” What’s the reason for the injustice, or, to be
more accurate, what the rule describes as the appearance of injustice?
“Every base advanced by a runner must be accounted for.”

Rule 9.12(a)(7) means that it is entirely possible to make an error even
though you have made the correct play. Utter gave me another example, a
local one this time: “Bautista’s in right field. Guy’s tagging up on
third, and he throws a laser, a one-bounce laser, to the catcher. And
that’s what the catcher wants, a one-bouncer. He doesn’t want it on the
fly,” Utter explained. “But that bounce the catcher can’t handle. It
gets through him, and if you got to call an error, you got to call it on
Bautista—who did exactly what he was supposed to do.” Doing the right
thing means risking an error. And making an error can be evidence of the
right decision.

The vision of justice is absolute; the error records an imagined
baseball utopia, not some mere assessment of accomplishment. It is about
what should have happened—a vision of a better world than the one that
exists. The record reflects responsibility, which matters more than any
player’s intention.

As a register of the quality of fielding, the error works generally but
not specifically. A 2006 study published in The Journal of Quantitative
Analysis in Sports found that “the error rate is higher when the
quality of fielding is suspect, i.e., the performance of an expansion
team in its first year, or the fielding done by replacement players
during World War II, and lower when playing conditions are better, e.g.,
on artificial turf and during night games.” But the metric fails utterly
when it comes to describing the abilities of individual players. You
cannot commit an error by being slow of foot, or by losing mental focus,
or by miscommunicating with your teammates. If a player walks instead of
runs to catch a ball and fails to catch it, that’s not an error. If a
player thinks somebody else is going to catch the ball and it falls,
that, too, is not an error. You have to do something right to commit an
error.

The record holder for baseball errors in the M.L.B. is Herman Long, who
accumulated a thousand and ninety-six in a sixteen-year career that
began in 1889. (Games in the nineteenth century routinely saw twenty
errors or more.) The Hall of Fame pitcher Kid Nichols described Long as “the
greatest shortstop of them all.” Of active players, the Texas Rangers’
third baseman Adrián Beltré leads the league in career errors, having
accumulated more than three hundred in twenty seasons. He has won the
Platinum Glove Award for best defensive player in the majors twice, and
the Gold Glove for best third baseman five times. The error is a rare
example of a sarcastic statistic—its real sense is opposite to what it
explicitly states. The way you know that Beltré is one of the greatest
fielders of his generation is that he has earned the most errors.

The logical conclusion to this radical inconsistency between the number
of errors and the quality of defense is that the error is not there to
reflect the play of the fielder at all; it’s there to preserve the
record of hitters and pitchers. In 2014, Yu Darvish, then with the Texas
Rangers, took a perfect game into the seventh inning against the Red
Sox. Then David Ortiz hit a popup, which both Alex Rios in the outfield
and Rougned Odor at second base could have caught. Because of a
miscommunication, Rios pulled back and the ball fell between them. It
was ruled an error, and the no-hitter kept going. (Ortiz hit a single in
the ninth to spoil the party.)

The instinct of the scorer in that game was to protect the record of the
pitcher: the no-hitter was kept alive, if momentarily. Miscommunication
renders the problem of the error particularly thorny. Fielding is not an
individual action but a collective one, and the current rule on the
error reflects that in no way. “As official scorers, when we had our
meetings, the one thing that we wanted was a team error,” Utter told me.
“For instance, when a ball drops between three fielders, and they just
stand there and look at each other, why should that penalize the
pitcher?”

Ortiz challenged the ruling, and the error was overturned. But Ortiz
only challenged the error ruling after his hit in the ninth. Surely, he
wouldn’t have taken away a no-hitter from a guy over a disputation
around an error. Then again, Ortiz was right. By the current definitions
of the rulebook, no error occurred, and he deserved the hit he asked
for.

Baseball goes to the trouble to record a highly subjective decision that
does not affect the outcome of the game and fails to communicate
meaningfully a player’s ability. Why?

In the Olympics of ancient Greece, the pankration, a kind of all-in
wrestling, sort of like ultimate fighting, was the most important and
the greatest sport—the highlight of the games. The reason for its
centrality was its brutality: there were no judges. The competitors
themselves determined who won and who lost, either by surrendering or by
dying (and many did die). Pankration offered a purity of outcome, which
was its own kind of justice.

Baseball has another vision. It is a spectacle of fairness as well as of
accomplishment. What are we watching when we watch a game of baseball?
We are witnessing the progression of a struggle toward an outcome
through which the skill and power of the players and the team can be
expressed, like in any sport, but we are also watching the lines of a
moral universe being demarcated in a game played, uniquely, without
time. The error declares that might is not always right, that win and
loss is an insufficient measure of the experience of human contest. The
error belongs to the moral dimension of American life—a highly
systematic, entirely futile effort to imagine the terms of a perfect
world inside even so minor a forum as the official rulebook of a boys’
game.

There is less than one error committed per game in the major leagues,
and the scorers are only paid around a hundred and seventy-five bucks a
game to record them. When you think about the error a little, it doesn’t
matter much. When you think about it for a little while longer, nothing
matters more. It was not just a game that happened; there was also a
game that should have happened. The world isn’t just the world that is;
there is also a world that should have been.