A Proliferation of Pitcher Errors

Earlier this week, Jays Centre's Owen Hill wrote about the Blue Jays' defense. He pointed out that the Jays are one of the best teams in the league according to Baseball Savant's Fielding Run Value (FRV), despite ranking as one of the worst in errors and fielding percentage.

After reading Owen's article, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. I was watching clips of all the errors the Blue Jays have made this season when it occurred to me how many of them were on the pitchers. Toronto has made 27 errors in 2026, the fifth-most in MLB. Of those 27 errors, nine belong to the arms. My gut reaction? That's a lot of pitcher errors. 

My gut was right. 

Pitchers aren't usually the best fielders. That's not a dig. They just have other priorities. What's more, by nature of where they stand on the field, the batted balls they have to work with are often moving very slowly or very fast. In either case, those can be tough to deal with.

However, pitchers are limited in the number of errors they can make because they don't handle the ball all that much. They make errors at a higher rate than players at any other position, but even so, they're typically only responsible for 12-13% of errors league-wide. 

That's why I was surprised that pitchers have made one-third of the Blue Jays' errors in 2026. 

This year's pitching staff has already compiled more errors than the team's pitchers have in 13 separate seasons of Blue Jays history. Three of those were shortened seasons (1981, 1994, and 2020), but the other 10 were full 162-game (or even 163-game) campaigns. In 1988 and again in '92, Toronto's pitchers made a full-season franchise-record-low five errors; this year, they passed that total 11 games into the schedule. As a more recent comparison, the 2022 and '23 staffs only made six errors each year. That's an average of one per month. This year's pitchers already had eight errors by the end of April.

Looking around the league, there are almost always a handful of pitching staffs that don't top nine errors all year. The last time that every single team's pitchers made more than nine errors was in 1974, before the Blue Jays even existed. 

Let that sink in. It's not unusual for a team's pitchers to make nine or fewer errors all season. The Jays' arms have already hit that mark by mid-May.

For more historical context, the Blue Jays' pitchers are on pace for 34 errors this season. That would surpass the franchise record, held by the inaugural 1977 team; their pitchers made 30 errors. In fact, it would be the highest number of errors by any pitching staff in the live ball era; the record (33) currently belongs to the pitchers of the 1976 San Francisco Giants.

So, at the rate they're mishandling the ball, Toronto's pitchers have a chance to break records that have stood for 50 years. But that might be underselling it. You see, errors are less frequent than they used to be. As Owen mentioned in his piece, MLB's official scorers have been getting more lenient in recent years, classifying fewer and fewer plays as errors. The league's .986 fielding percentage in 2026 is the highest it's been at any point in major league history. We're on pace to see 2,370 errors by the end of this season. In contrast, MLB fielders made 3,458 errors in 1976 – when there were only 24 teams. Fifty years ago, teams averaged almost an error per game. In 2026, it's more like one every other game. The rate has nearly been cut in half. 

Here's another way to think about it. The Blue Jays' pitchers are on pace to make 34 errors this year, and their nine errors account for just under 1.5% of all errors in MLB. However, if they were making errors at the same rate compared to league average in 1976, they would be on pace for 50. Fifty!

If their current pace holds – which, to be clear, is unlikely, but we're having fun here – the Blue Jays would also set a record for the highest "pitcher error-to-position player error ratio" in major league history. One in three of Toronto's errors this year was committed by a pitcher. Right now, the full-season record belongs to the 2024 New York Mets, whose pitchers were responsible for about one in four of the team's errors (23 out of 94). And in case you're interested, the record in the opposite direction belongs to the 2021 Washington Nationals. The team made 96 errors that year (third-most in the NL), but only one of those errors was by a pitcher. 

It bears repeating that I don't actually expect the Blue Jays' pitchers – or the rest of their fielders – to maintain their current error pace. Errors are always unpredictable, and a quarter of a season is a tiny sample. I'm only bringing up full-season paces and historical records to contextualize how unusual it is that we've already seen so many pitcher errors at this early point in the year.

Indeed, the real story here is the high number of errors the Blue Jays' pitchers have made to this point in the year. So, please check back tomorrow morning, because I'm putting together a piece where you can watch all of those misplays in all of their glory.