Idiots Write About Sports

In last night’s Giants-A’s tilt, there was a particularly awful A’s play in the first inning. I’m sure Phil was furious when it happened.

Basically, if you didn’t see it, with Ray Durham on first, Marquis Grissom hit a comebacker to Barry Zito. Zito wheeled to second, where nobody was covering. Scutaro was standing about six feet behind the bag, while Crosby was standing at short sucking on his glove. Zito tossed to Scutaro, who couldn’t do anything with the ball, and all hands were safe.

TV commentary at the time and the newspapers today indicate that while Scutaro was originally charged with the error, it was transferred to Crosby after confirming that he was too busy picking his nose to stand on second base.

But I don’t think that makes any sense. Isn’t it a baseball axiom that you can’t award errors for mental mistakes, only physical ones? So since there were no physical mistakes (just a failure to cover), and Zito had the option to throw to first to get the easy out, why isn’t this a fielder’s choice?

Actually, I’m apparently not the only one who’s confused. The linescore in the boxscore on ESPN claim the A’s only had one error, but the rest of the boxscore indicates that Zito only gave up one earned run, and that Crosby had two errors. Which is it?

Also, this whole thing points out the idiocy of the “earned run” concept. Barry Zito gave up back-to-back home runs. And yet in his ERA there’s no indication of it! That’s ridiculous, fielder’s choice or no.

If someone can explain to me why Zito shouldn’t have been charged with six earned runs, I’d like to hear it.