As baseball approached its unofficial 500,000th error, one thing was clear: A shortstop would most likely make it, since that position is most closely associated with the statistic.

That it was Jose Reyes who reached the dubious milestone for baseball somehow seemed appropriate then.

On Saturday, in the Miami Marlins’ victory over the playoff-bound Cincinnati Reds, Reyes made history on a simple ground ball by Drew Stubbs, flubbing a play he had made successfully thousands of times. It was yet another strange event in a mixed bag of a career that has included taking himself out of a game to preserve a batting title, winning three stolen base crowns and once being referred to by his manager, Jerry Manuel, in exclusively feminine pronouns.

In one of baseball’s innumerable puzzles, errors are most often committed by shortstops, who are widely regarded as the most talented fielders in the game. Of the top five career leaders in errors, according to sports-reference.com, the website that tracked the countdown to 500,000, four are shortstops, including the career leader, Herman Long, who had 1,096. The combination of total volume of plays and the difficulty associated with those plays makes errors a fact of life for even the best shortstops.

It does not stop with shortstops. The amusing nature of errors is that the players who pile up the most are generally the finest fielders, or at least the longest serving ones. The top two active leaders in errors are Rafael Furcal, among the best throwing shortstops to play the game, and Adrian Beltre, the game’s best third baseman by a wide margin.

The march to 500,000 errors, while entertaining, was hardly official. On a countdown page created by sports-reference.com, Sean Forman, the site’s founder, began the post by saying, “This is utterly random, completely meaningless and less than 100 percent accurate, but earlier this summer I noticed that MLB was nearing 500,000 errors since 1876.”

Clearly anticipating some backlash, Forman added, in bold, “So always remember this milestone is for fun and is accurate to the best of our ability, but in no way 100 percent accurate.”

True to form, Elias Sports Bureau, keeper of Major League Baseball’s official statistics, declined to comment on the milestone, citing the inconsistency of record keeping with error totals before recent seasons.

The countdown did, however, provide some entertainment to go with baseball’s myriad pennant races and recalled a similar countdown by baseball-reference.com, a sister site to sports-reference.com, in 2008, which tracked the race for baseball’s 250,000th home run, which was credited to Gary Sheffield, then of the Detroit Tigers.

“There was a lot of fun excitement about it,” Forman said of the error countdown in an email exchange. “It happened at a nice time of the season as the playoff runs are just starting to wind up and also baseball has ceded some of the spotlight to football.”

In another era, Major League Baseball was more than happy to participate in a similar countdown. In 1975, as baseball approached its millionth run, the race was celebrated throughout the league despite the total number of runs being similarly vulnerable to worries about record keeping. That countdown was advertised in stadiums and updated during games.

On May 4, Bob Watson of the Houston Astros raced home from second on a three-run home run by Milt May, knowing he had a chance at the milestone. He beat Dave Concepcion of the Reds, also sprinting for home in a separate game, by an estimated four seconds. Upon scoring the run, Watson was awarded $10,000 and a million Tootsie Rolls.

As of yet, Reyes has not been reported to have received celebratory candy of any kind. A Butterfinger, perhaps?

Regardless of whether Reyes’ error was truly No. 500,000, it is clear when looking at the leader boards that the pace of errors has slowed to a near crawl since Long’s playing days.

The error rate per team, as high as 6.01 a game in 1876, is down to 0.62 this season, tied for the fourth-lowest rate all time. This will almost certainly be the 66th consecutive season of less than one error a game.

Were he alive to ask questions, Long would most likely wonder what had taken the league so long to reach 500,000. After all, he did not just set the career record for errors, but also the single-season record of 122 in 1889, totaling more than this season’s top five players combined. An above-average fielder in terms of range, Long would most likely question the effort of a league that has not had a player record as many as 40 errors in a season since Jose Offerman, the Dodgers shortstop, had 42 in 1992.

The active leader, Furcal, does not even crack the top 350, with his 250 errors in 13 seasons tying him at 368th with Ossie Bluege, a third baseman for the Washington Senators in the 1920s.

The decline in errors has a substantial list of contributing factors, including superior equipment, better tended fields and more conservative official scorers. Huge increases in home runs and strikeouts have led to a decline in total chances, which also brings down the total.

All of those things have contributed to a leaguewide fielding percentage of .983 this season, just below the record of .984 recorded in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

“Players are fundamentally so much better now at fielding than they used to be,” Forman said. “Most kids get pretty good instruction for years and years. It all plays together to reduce the number of errors made. And points out how useless fielding percentage is as a metric.”

Reyes, who is personally responsible for 133 of the 500,000-plus errors, including 16 this year entering today, did not take himself out of the game to celebrate this milestone. He was most likely unaware of the potential history he had made. On a Marlins team that has played far below expectations this season, he has mistakes of a much larger magnitude to worry about. And correct.