A simple question as the Red Sox smash through 100 errors

What went wrong, again?

In baseball, 100 has long resonated. A sign of extremes, on both sides of the spectrum.

In the regular season, 100 victories is dominance, even if the bloating of the playoffs means it rarely leads to championship gold. Conversely, 100 losses is a level of bad beyond, reserved only for the worst. (It barely slowed the White Sox, who reached it more than a week ago.)

When the RBI was king, 100 was the checkbox of a great season. Seventeen players scored 100 runs last year, and there wasn’t a slouch in the bunch. We think in 100s, seeking those .300 hitters with a .400 on-base and .500 slugging. We lament the loss of 200-inning starters, with more 200-strikeout arms than ever.

With that in mind, I note the 2024 Red Sox made their 100th error in Monday’s loss to the Mets. Unlike so many of its predecessors, it didn’t cost them — Connor Wong dropped a Jeff McNeil foul pop, but Brayan Bello struck McNeil out anyway two pitches later.

No. 101 hurt more, but only a bit. Tyler O’Neill’s fumbling of Luis Torrens’s two-out shot down the left-field line scored DJ Stewart, but only a play early. (Francisco Lindor, for whom those MVP chants you heard weren’t entirely ridiculous, singled two pitches later.)

And thus, the Red Sox weren’t saddled with more unearned runs on the night they became the first to hit triple digits in errors. However, with 84 unearned on the season and 24 games to play, I like their chances to reach 100 more than I do their chances to reach past Game No. 162.

“We are not playing well right now. It’s not going our way right now,” manager Alex Cora told reporters. “We have to show up tomorrow and try to win a game. We are running out of time.”

He was not speaking specifically about the defense, as the Sox bats have gone cold enough — a .205/.251/.349 line and 2.7 runs per game in losing 8 of 11 — to make it a secondary concern. The defense he did speak about wasn’t an error, but was arguably the night’s most critical.

When Jarren Duran broke the wrong way on Brandon Nimmo’s third-inning shot, the ball getting over his head for a double and a Mets lead they’d never surrender. A tough play, but one Duran could’ve handled better.

“Duran is the best defensive center fielder in the league. He is going to make mistakes sometimes,” Cora told reporters. “For me, he was trying to make a play. Bad read and he didn’t make the play. That’s going to happen.”

Errors, of course, are an imperfect metric, subjective even beyond the idea a defender has to get close enough to make a play to get dinged for botching one. Look no further than leaguewide — the four seasons with the fewest errors charged in MLB history are, in fact, the last four.

From 2021-23, 13 teams made at least 100 errors in a season. In 2018 and 2019, the last full seasons before the pandemic, 11 did — each year.

I suppose it’s possible high-level baseball players wiled away COVID lockdowns with daily defensive drills, coming back better in the field than the sport has ever seen. Seems more likely MLB, aware of its ever-dwindling offensive numbers, made a quiet directive to scorers to be a little less stingy.

Of those 14 100-error seasons since the pandemic, only one franchise can claim three of them. Your Red Sox, who were second-worst with 108 errors in 2021, second-worst with 102 in 2023, and have nine more than their closest pursuers with three weeks to go this season.

So much for a revamp.

“I think I’ve been talking about defense on this bench since 2018. At the end of the day, at this level, you pitch and play good defense, you’ve got a chance to win ballgames,” Cora told reporters in February prior to spring training. “If you look at our season last year . . . from August 15 on, we sucked. . . . I’m not proud of what we did defensively. Decision making was awful. We just got to get better.”

I’d argue they have, at least a little, given the stabilizing force of Trevor Story on the left side of the infield lasted eight games. The Story-less Sox are 22nd in Fangraphs’ defensive runs above average this season, up from a distant 30th. Duran (plus 8) and Wilyer Abreu (plus 5) are among the higher-end outfielders in outs above average, with two of Boston’s worst names we’ve not thought of for months — Enmanuel Valdez at second (minus-7) and Pablo Reyes at third (minus-4).

The errors? Let’s parse them beyond that raw 101.

Rafael Devers has 10 at third base — seven fielding, and three throwing. The grand total is second to Ceddanne Rafaela’s 12 on the team, but the seven in the field leads. Quite the playlist they make. Context does matter, though, and the year figures to be a mild improvement off the 19 of a year ago. (Which itself was better than the 20+ days of the late 2010s.)

Markedly, the percentage of his gaffes on throws is the lowest of his career, a potential sign of better decision making that matches what the eyes tell. Again, faint praise, but something. He is what he is, but again without Story to help, he’s no worse than a year ago.

Rafaela is in the midst of a genuinely unique season, with 68 starts at shortstop and 61 in center field. (No other MLB player has made 60 starts at those spots in the same year since at least 1901.) Without his versatility and willingness to go where needed, we’d have ceased to humor October dreams months ago.

“I play whatever position is best for the team that day,” Rafaela told the Globe on Monday, asked simply what position he plays. “That’s my answer.”

He spoke about needing to remind himself not to rush at short, where nine of the 12 errors have come. There’s certainly plenty of that in his playlist, be it in attempted fields where he’s thinking about the throw, or throws that should’ve simply been pocketed. The athleticism clearly isn’t the issue, and that he’s managed to be top 15 in outfield runs saved despite playing 500 innings fewer than the league leader . . . time, and stability, figures to only help.

Hopefully it will also help him at the plate. That changeup Tarik Skubal struck him out on in Detroit was outside by a hectare.

The rest of the list? The departed Dom Smith made seven errors at first in 77 games, and Reese McGuire had six behind the plate. David Hamilton made seven at short in 62, but had played his way to league average in fielding run value when he went on the injured list with a busted finger last week.

O’Neill’s error Monday was his seventh, which doesn’t even include the series-changing miss against the Yankees in late July. “Two-time Gold Glover” was among the talking points when the Sox acquired him this winter, and it didn’t translate to Boston, where he’s been average if we’re being generous.

Wong’s was his sixth, and the chilling of his bat since the start of July makes his ugly play in the field — bottom percentile in fielding run value, and nearly as bad in blocking and framing — sting all the more.

Suffice to say, it’s a long way from the sort of marked improvement Cora’s tough talk in the spring hinted was a priority. It’s impossible to judge, though, without noting injuries ransacked the pitching staff (which impacts the defense). Expecting Story’s presence to lift all boats speaks to some lazy teambuilding last winter, but his health would’ve made a calculable difference.

A phrase around the Red Sox that grows increasingly more relevant by the day.