Snyder's Soapbox: Please eliminate 'defensive indifference' from the rulebook

Welcome to Snyder's Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it's free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you'll get smarter, though. That's a money-back guarantee. Let's get to it.

You know what's dumb? The scoring play that is defensive indifference. 

A quick explainer: Most of the time when a runner takes a base without a ball being put in play, it's a stolen base. He could advance via a passed ball, wild pitch or balk, too, but it's usually a stolen base. 

There are some scenarios where what looks like a steal, however, is not. Let's say a team is losing by three runs in the ninth and there are two outs with a runner on first base. The defense might decide to ignore the runner to the point that he just steals second without his attempt being contested. No step-off, no throw over, nothing. This is not called a stolen base but instead defensive indifference. And it drives me crazy. 

There are times that teams allow a run to score in order to get someone else out instead. Is that indifference? No, absolutely not. The run still counts. The defense wasn't indifferent to the runner on third base who came home to score. They prioritized. The run still counts! When the defense is so much more worried about positioning and focusing on the batter, they are prioritizing and allowing the runner to steal second, the same as when they allow a runner to score in order to record an out.

I'm trying to understand why this even mattered in the first place when they decided to implement this rule. Was it a huge problem with some players padding their stolen base stats the handful of times per season when the specific situation happened? A bunch of people started calling the commissioner complaining that this player or that player had one too many stolen bases and it was an injustice? And then the commish decided this travesty just couldn't be allowed to continue? 

Are stolen base totals so sacred that we need the official scorer getting bogged down with deciding if the defense was trying hard enough to hold on the runner or not? 

This is lunacy, man. There's no need for any minutia here.

It's an easy fix, too. Take the official scorer's decision out of the equation. If a player steals a base, it's a stolen base. There's no need to get bogged down in details with whether or not the defense cared enough. It's time to remove "defensive indifference" from our working baseball statistical vocabulary.