The manner in which baseball people evaluate players' fielding performance—adding up their errors, and applauding the guy with the fewest—struck him as an outrage. "What is an error?" he asked. "It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. It's a moral judgment, really, in the peculiar quasi-morality of the locker room.... Basketball scorers count mechanical errors, but those are a record of objective facts: team A has the ball, then team B has the ball.... But the fact of a baseball error is that no play has been made but that the scorer thinks it should have. It is, uniquely, a record of opinions."
James went on to explain that the concept of an error, like many baseball concepts, was tailored to an earlier, very different game. Errors had been invented in the late 1850s, when fielders didn't wear gloves, the outfield went unmowed and the infield ungroomed, and the ball was bashed around until it was lopsided. In 1860, a simple pop fly was an adventure. Any ball hit more than a few feet from a fielder on leave from the Civil War was unplayable. Under those circumstances, James conceded, it might have made some kind of sense to judge a fielder by his ability to cope with balls hit right at him. But a century later the statistic was still being used, unaided by any other, when anyone with eyes could see that balls hit at big league players were a trivial detail in a bigger picture. A talent for avoiding obvious failure was no great trait in a big league baseball player; the easiest way not to make an error was to be too slow to reach the ball in the first place. After all, wrote James, "you have to do something right to get an error; even if the ball is hit right at you, then you were standing in the right place to begin with."