The other day Allan Hazlett argued that “truth in basketball statistics is radically response-dependent”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/useandmisuse/2004_04_01_useandmisuse_archive.html#108258544370762884. I assume his argument is meant to carry across to baseball as well. Allan’s point is that although we may dispute whether the officials got a call right at the time, eventually no one will dispute the call. So Allan concludes that the truth of basketball stats claims depends on what the referees do. But that doesn’t follow from the data. All that follows is that eventually the referees’ calls will cease being disputed.

Here’s a nice case of that. In the 8th inning of tonight’s Red Sox-Yankees game, Jason Varitek hit a bloop into shallow right. Enrique Wilson, the second baseman, and Gary Sheffield, the right fielder, ran towards it. Eventually Sheffield called Wilson off and Wilson peeled away, leaving Sheffield with a clean play on the ball, and a perfect view of the ball bouncing off his left wrist onto the turf. Since Wilson makes the minimum and Sheffield over $12 million, naturally an error was charged to Wilson.

Now Allan may argue that in ten years no one will dispute that it was an error on Wilson, and that may be true. But that just means that everyone will be wrong. In ten years it will be an error on Sheffield, just like it was at the time.

By the way, apparently the official scorer’s explanation is that it’s an error on Wilson because he “caused the error” by running out for the ball and affecting Sheffield’s concentration or something. Of course the pitcher also caused the error by not throwing the ball past Varitek’s bat, so I think this one should really have been E-1. Jerry Remy suggested that Wilson might have caused the error by yelling out “Drop it! Drop it!” as the play developed. That seems like the most charitable explanation of the scorer’s decision.

Footnote: It isn’t clear that fouls are like errors in this respect. I think in the disputes Allan talks about ‘foul’ is ambiguous. In one sense a foul is just whatever is called by the refs. In another sense, it’s the kind of thing that can be disputed after the call is made. In the second sense, it’s a normative claim and the referees don’t get to determine what is and isn’t a foul. I think this is a simpler explanation of what’s going on in the basketball case than what Allan suggests.