How Often Does the Ball Roll Right Through Somebody’s Legs?

I found this in my notes last week. I have no idea how long it’s been there. It says: “How many times this season has an infielder let the ball go right between their legs?” I had no idea whatsoever. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen it. Probably in a highlight from the 1986 World Series.

Baseball is the ultimate scorekeeping sport, and thanks to sites like ours, when you ask how many times any particular event has happened, the answer is usually easy to find. How often does a righty hit a home run off a lefty in the top of the eighth inning with the tying run in the on-deck circle? It took me twice as long to type that question out as it did to look up the answer: It has happened five times in each of the last three years. Easy. But so far as I know, nobody keeps a count of grounders that go right through the wickets.

Errors get classified in certain ways. Our leaderboard tracks fielding and throwing errors. The play-by-play notes on Baseball Savant add in missed-catch errors. Other sources differentiate between reached-on-error errors and runner-advanced errors. But that’s about it. Because they represent arguably the most embarrassing way to commit an error, between-the-legs errors are special in a human sense, but nobody splits them out into their own column because there’s nothing particularly special about them in a baseball sense. At least, you wouldn’t think so initially.

For a while now, Sam Miller has been documenting how much harder it has gotten to be charged with an error. The grade inflation is real, and it’s one reason that it’s so hard to compare defense across different eras. But if we had been tracking between-the-legs errors, on their own, I think they could have served as a kind of constant. Even today’s most lenient official scorer can’t overlook a ball that goes right through the wickets. No matter how hard it’s hit, no matter how funky the hop, there’s just no way to talk yourself into the idea that the fielder bears no responsibility for a ball that literally rolls between their legs. No matter the era, that’s never been a hit. If we had been splitting out errors between the legs over the years, then we would have been able to get a true sense of whether fielders have grown more or less sure-handed over time.

That is a lot of preamble to tell you that I didn’t have a convenient way to answer this question. I couldn’t look it up. I couldn’t figure it out by dicing up the numbers. I had to find these errors one by one, which meant hitting the tape hard. According to Baseball Savant, batters hit 52,915 groundballs during the 2025 season, and 44,065 were hit to an infielder (including pitchers and catchers). The infielders made errors on 894 of those groundballs. As it turns out, we actually saw a few more than 894 errors on those plays, because every once in a while, a player or a team makes more than one error on a single grounder, as Geraldo Perdomo is happy to demonstrate:

As classified by Statcast, 500 of those plays involved fielding errors. That was as far as I could split things out. I watched all 500 of those groundballs to see whether or not the ball went through the fielder’s legs. When I couldn’t tell from Baseball Savant’s 15-second clip, which happened a lot, I tracked down the play on MLB.TV and watched slow-motion replays until I was sure. It took me a few days to get through them all, but watching 500 errors in a row taught me a lot.

I learned that the nomenclature for the different subcategories of errors is a lot squishier than I realized. I thought I had a pretty good taxonomy in my head. You can boot the ball, which is when it clanks off a glove or a body part. You can kick the ball, a subset of booting, which in this case either means you literally kick it with your foot or that it caroms (kicks) off of you and goes particularly far. You can fumble the ball, which means you get your glove on it and keep it in front of you, but can’t fully corral it. You can bobble the ball, which means you glove it but just can’t get enough control over it to actually throw it over to first in time. Lastly, you can whiff, which means you miss the ball entirely. That’s what I thought, anyway. I was wrong.

Pretty much any of those words can be used to describe any kind of fielding error. Each one can serve as a catch-all when the player catches nothing. Play-by-play announcers generally use their own go-to verbiage for an error rather than using language specific to the play. Because they’re watching the action from high up in the press box and don’t have the luxury of replay, many rely on a go-to phrase. Kevin Brown of the Orioles is big on “kicks it,” while Dan Schulman of the Blue Jays likes “it gets under the glove of…” They like to stay in the flow, keeping their narration steady rather than waiting to get more specific. Tom McCarthy of the Phillies, on the other hand, isn’t afraid to let the play breathe for a second and then name the particular subspecies of error.

I learned to think more deeply about what goes into an error. If you’ve ever considered yourself an infielder, you know that outside the wildest circumstances, a bad hop is a poor excuse for an error. Your job is to get yourself in position to get a good short hop or long hop, avoiding the in-between hops that leave you with an uncertain estimated trajectory. There are always special circumstances, though. Just ask poor Will Warren, the only pitcher to earn an error for a ball that went between his legs. Pitchers are usually immune from this particular error. If the ball goes between their legs, it’s because it was hit hard enough that they can’t be expected to be ready to field it in time. The bar for pitcher fielding is incredibly low, and that’s where it should be. It’s absurd that we ask pitchers to put every fiber of their being into throwing a ball 100 mph, and then, less than a second later, field a ball coming back at them with even greater velocity. It’s a wonder they’re capable of moving at all after they release the pitch. We should give them a little nap every time they exceed 95 mph instead of sending line drives back at their fragile bodies.

Warren’s error came with special circumstances. He got Jordan Westburg to chase a sinker that ran way inside. Westburg managed to make weak contact, breaking his bat and sending a deadly sliver straight out toward Warren on the mound. The ball followed the bat, and after one soft hop, the next shot beneath Warren’s glove thanks to Rafael Nadal forehand levels of topspin. It was brutal, and Warren fairly collapsed in anguish:

After watching 500 fielding errors, I also have a newfound appreciation for the way a baseball glove works. It operates a bit like a funnel. If you keep your hands soft, angle your glove properly, and let the ball hit it within a few inches of center, the ball will find its way to the pocket. But if the hop is just an inch or two wider than you expect, it’ll hit the thumb and ricochet. If it’s an inch or two higher, it’ll hit clank off the heel or roll right up your arm. If it’s an inch or two lower, it will bounce in and out of the web and fall right at your feet. These are near misses, small miscalculations, and they can happen for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it’s a tough play and the fielder is on the move. Maybe the speed of the runner or the game situation forces them to charge a ball they would normally wait back on. Maybe it’s just a funky hop because the ball has crazy spin or it hits the edge of the grass or a sprinkler head. If any of those things happens, the ball will bounce off the fielder. I saw all of those outcomes much more often than I saw balls go through the legs.

It’s just plain unusual for a major league defender to whiff that badly on a ball hit directly at them. When sabermetricians introduced range stats a few decades ago, we learned you’d rather have a player with great range, even if they’re a bit more error-prone. Errors look ugly, but they’re no more damaging than balls that sneak through the infield and go down as base hits. Elly De La Cruz can lead the league in errors and stick at short because the advanced numbers say his range and his arm are pretty close to making up for his miscues. Even so, at a time when slick glovework is arguably less valued than it’s ever been, there’s still no such thing as a professional baseball player who can’t stop a grounder hit directly at them.

So here’s how rare that play is. Out of the 500 fielding errors on groundballs, just 50 passed between the fielder’s legs. Of those 50, I would classify nine as freak plays where the ball just happened to pass between the fielder’s legs. Five fielders were running hard to either their glove side or backhand side, and when they couldn’t come up with the hop, the ball somehow weaved through their churning legs like a hole-in-one on the windmill hole at a mini golf course. Two fielders had the ball bounce off the tip of their glove and settle at their feet, then managed to literally kick the ball back and through their legs. Even a pitcher and a catcher got involved in the action, overrunning weak toppers and watching helplessly as they trickled between their legs:

Like I said, these were all freak plays, incidentals. They were nothing like the archetype of a routine grounder that goes right through the wickets. That happened just 41 times all season. That’s once every 59 games. In other words, over the course of the season, the average baseball fan who watches a few games a week should expect to see a ball go right through the wickets once, if they’re lucky. Those plays represent just 1.7% of all errors and 0.025% of all plate appearances. It’s incredibly rare for a ball to roll right through an infielder’s legs.

On the other hand, those plays represent a huge proportion of the country’s Strategic Sad Infielder Closeup Reserve. Directors know that players who let the ball trickle between their legs will bring some genuine emotion to the broadcast, so the camera always finds them. As with any error, we get to see players looking down at their gloves as if to ask why they decided to go on strike:

We get to see players looking back at the scoreboard and waiting resignedly for the big E to flash on the screen:

We get some obligatory shots of general human misery, which everybody loves:

And lastly, courtesy of Angels’ infielder Kevin Newman, we get some good old-fashioned profanity:

Although these plays were exceedingly rare in 2025, you could increase your chances of seeing one in a few ways. Anyone who happened to tune into the last few innings of the Rays-Red Sox game on September 20 got to watch Junior Caminero straddle two grounders in a row. The calls on the home broadcast were nearly identical, so it’s particularly fun when you stack them on top of each other:

The other big way to ensure that you saw a bunch of these plays was to be a fan of the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds led all of baseball by letting six grounders go between their red legs, twice as many as any other team. (Six teams didn’t do it once: the Astros, Brewers, Cubs, Padres, Rangers, and Red Sox.) Coming into this exercise, the player I was most excited to watch was Elly De La Cruz. That’s by no means an unusual state of affairs. He’s always exciting to watch. But in this case, De La Cruz struck me as a leading candidate for this sort of error, not just because he makes so many errors, but because he’s got such big long legs. Every player sets their feet wide when they go down to field a grounder, but that width is relative to their overall size. He doth bestride the narrow world Colossus, and no shortstop in baseball has a bigger five hole for the ball to sneak through. With so much real estate to cover, I figured De La Cruz had to let more balls under the bridge. I was right. He led all of baseball with three between-the-legs errors, more than every other entire team except the Rays and the Royals. Gavin Lux, Spencer Steer, and Matt McLain also chipped in to give the Reds their commanding lead.

Before you assume that only error-prone players let the ball roll between their legs, you should know that seven different Gold Glovers were guilty of this particular crime: Maikel Garcia, Bobby Witt Jr., Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Brendan Donovan, J.P. Crawford, Dylan Moore, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. And we should probably count Hyeseong Kim, who won four Golden Gloves in the KBO. In other words, nearly one in five of these grounders rolled through the legs of a Gold Glover! All of this is to say that no matter how good defense gets, between-the-legs errors will always be with us. We might as well start tracking them now. Without further ado, please enjoy all 41 of them: