Major League Baseball is on pace for about 0.5 errors a game this season. That would break the record of roughly 0.52 a game set just two years ago, and five of the lowest error-rate seasons in the sport’s 150-year history have all landed since 2021. Nobody got better at catching a baseball. Scorers did.
You already know the bit if you’ve watched enough baseball. Ball skips clean through the shortstop’s legs. Should be an easy, no-argument error. Instead the scoreboard flashes “hit,” because, say it with me in the whiny, sarcastic voice, “it was a hard play.” No kidding it was a hard play. That’s the entire premise of the sport. Nobody’s buying a ticket to watch easy plays.
Here’s the part that should embarrass everyone involved: the rule isn’t vague. MLB’s own scoring rule says a fielder gets charged with an error any time, in the scorer’s judgment, “ordinary effort” would have made the play. Not perfect effort. Not diving-catch effort. Ordinary effort, from a professional who does this every single day for a living, and still gets paid whether the ball finds his glove or his ankles.
Defenders of the trend point to smarter defensive positioning and better gloves. Fine, some of that is real. But positioning explains routine outs turning into web gems, not scorers getting cagier about calling a boot a boot. Those are two different things, and blending them into one tidy excuse is exactly how a record nobody can quite explain gets treated as progress instead of a scoring problem.
Former big-league pitcher Ricky Bottalico said the quiet part out loud recently, calling the current scoring standard “a disgrace” and arguing it makes today’s fielders “look like little gemstones” next to guys like Scott Rolen and Jimmy Rollins, who played under scorers that actually called what they saw. He’s got a point, and it isn’t free. A pitcher’s ERA moves directly off whether the guy behind him gets tagged with a hit or an error, and ERA is real money at arbitration time. One generous ruling in July can cost a middle reliever actual dollars the following winter, on a play that, by the rule as written, should never have been in question.
Somewhere along the way, “hard play” stopped describing anything and started excusing everything. Every play in the majors is hard. That’s the whole reason the league exists. These are the best fielders alive, paid millions of dollars specifically because they’re supposed to make the play the rest of us can’t. “It was hard” isn’t a defense. It’s the job description.
My two cents: if ordinary effort gets it done, call the error. Somebody just needs to hand the scorers their own rulebook back.
Photo by Ken Lund via Openverse, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.