NYT: Baseball’s 500,000th error finds Jose Reyes
From Benjamin Hoffman at the New York Times on September 17, 2012, with quotes from SABR member Sean Forman:
As baseball approached its unofficial 500,000th error, one thing was clear: a shortstop would most likely make it, since that position is most closely associated with the statistic.
That it was who reached the dubious milestone for baseball somehow seemed appropriate, then.
On Saturday, in the ’ victory over the playoff-bound Cincinnati Reds, Reyes made history on a simple ground ball by Drew Stubbs, flubbing a play he had made successfully thousands of times. It was yet another strange event in a mixed bag of a career that has included taking himself out of a game to preserve a batting title, winning three stolen base crowns and once being referred to by his manager Jerry Manuel in exclusively feminine pronouns.
In one of baseball’s innumerable puzzles, errors are committed most often by shortstops, who are widely regarded as the most talented fielders in the game. Of the top five career leaders in errors, according to Sports-Reference.com, the Web site that tracked the countdown to 500,000, four are shortstops, including the career leader, Herman Long, who had 1,096. The combination of total volume of plays and the difficulty associated with those plays makes errors a fact of life for even the best shortstops.
Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/sports/baseball/baseballs-500000th-error-finds-jose-reyes.html
Originally published: September 17, 2012. Last Updated: September 17, 2012.