Batter hits a looping line drive to right field, sinking to drop in front of the right fielder. Right fielder misjudges the ball, thinking he has a play on it. He dives but misses it, the ball skips past him and bounces to the wall. The batter ends up on third base, officially awarded a triple for what should have been a single and 2-base error. A friend argues that you shouldn’t penalize the defensive player for trying to make the “extraordinary” play. I argue that you shouldn’t give the batter an extra reward simply because the defensive player was unable to make that “extraordinary” play.

as the official scorer in Detroit calling a clear error on Polanco a base hit just to keep his errorless streak alive. Glad he made an error the next week in Boston, because who knows how long that charade would have continued.

I would like to extend the complaint to the earned run rule, if I may. I take no credit for this, credit goes to Michael Wolverton when he was at BP.

Pretend for a second that the earned-run rule hadn’t been invented over a century ago. In this alternate reality, baseball is played the same as it is now, except there’s one fewer column in the box score for pitchers. Pitchers are charged with all the runs they allow, and RA rather than ERA is the de facto standard for evaluating them. Everyone recognizes that good or bad fielding can affect a pitcher’s RA, but no one has come up with a good solution to the problem.

Then one day, an enthusiastic columnist writes:

I’ve done it! I’ve solved the problem of removing the corrupting influence of fielding on pitchers’ RA. We simply pay a sportswriter to sit in the press box, munch Cheetos, and decide which safeties came on plays that should have been made with normal fielding effort. Whenever one of these ‘errors’ occurs, we reconstruct the inning-not the game, mind you, just the inning-pretending as if the error never happened. Count up the runs that would have scored in this hypothetical reconstructed inning, and you have a revised run total for the pitcher. Things get a lot more complicated for relievers and team totals, and we’ll broaden the ‘plays that should have been made’ definition a little bit, but you get the idea.

For me, shifting the rule’s invention into the present day helps illustrate just how absurd it is. If it were proposed today, this idea would be dismissed out of hand, no matter who advanced it. If it had come from the blogosphere, people would use it as an example of the inferiority of the Internet. If it had come from a respected columnist like Peter Gammons or Thomas Boswell, people would wonder if senility was setting in. Absolutely no one would take this idea seriously. So why should it be any different just because the idea originated in 1888 instead of 2004?

That may be the last fun relic of chicanery from the early days of the game.
Nap Lajoie got a bit of help during his race against Cobb for the 1910 BA title; DiMaggio got an assist or two during his streak.
You know what gets my gander these days? Umps continuing to award HBPs to players who either let pitches hit them or move into them.