(from Wall Street Journal)

The New York Yankees’ 18-game streak without committing an error, which ended earlier this month, highlighted the stat’s increasing irrelevance to analysis of fielding proficiency.

While the Yankees’ feat was impressive, it also happened in an environment when fewer plays are being scored as errors than ever before. Through Tuesday, the overall major-league fielding percentage this year — the sum of putouts and assists divided by the sum of putouts, assists and errors — is 0.9841, the highest in major-league history.

Fielding proficiency is inching slowly towards perfection, from 0.9837 last year, 0.9836 the year before and 0.9832 in 2006, when the Red Sox set the previous record for an errorless streak of 17 games, according to data provided by Sean Forman of Baseball Reference.Yet such small shifts have a big effect on the probability of a team emerging from a given set of 18 straight games with clean stat sheets. For an average team so far this season, that probability is one in 59,100. That’s minuscule, but it’s twice as likely as it would have been when Boston pulled off its shorter streak. And it’s nearly 11 times more likely than an 18-game streak would have been when the St. Louis Cardinals set the prior record of 16 games in 1992, with a leaguewide fielding proficiency of 0.9811.

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MLB mlb, yankees, fielding percentage, stats