NO ANGEL
Longtime MLB umpire Angel Hernandez is retiring. Was he just a bad umpire, or was there more to the man?
There are mistakes made by umpires, and then there are the calls that Angel Hernandez would miss. Hernandez, who announced yesterday that he is retiring as an umpire in Major League Baseball, was a frequent lightning rod, drawing the ire from fans and players alike for his mistakes, wayward strike zone, and his indignant behavior when players complained about his strike zone and game-breaking decisions and calls he would make as an umpire.
It’s hard to describe just how bad and inconsistent Hernandez’s strike zones were. They defied logic, in a sport that runs on failure and eccentricities, at times. Even if an umpire calls a strike outside of the K-Zone that the local or national broadcast has so dutifully deployed in front of our television for our knowledge, it tends to be annoying, but it’s also his zone, his turf, his time to make the game funkier. As long as you’re consistent with that zone, a few balls being called strikes are within the parameters — and within the essential human element — of the game. Consistency is what the players and pitchers strive to see out of strike zones, which means that the hitters can possibly adjust to what the zone is, even if they’re getting shafted. Hernandez, on the other hand, was strange even by strange standards. See, this game when the Yankees played the Astros, where he calls balls that are strikes, and calls strikes that are balls at a clip that would even make the second worst umpire very queasy.
You don’t even know the half of it either; there’s more complete botched calls that Hernandez made that are just weird. There’s several moments in Hernandez’s umpiring career that are visibly embarrassing. Kyle Schwarber once had a complete manic episode after a misanthropic strikeout call; Masahiro Tanaka threw a ball right down the middle that Hernandez called a ball; Hernandez once threw out Bryce Harper on a pretty egregious strikeout call. To see him was to see an unchecked umpire show, a confounding philosophy, and a incompetent peerlessness that bordered on the conspiratoral. He didn’t always give leeway for the players to complain either. Whenever a call was made, and a player was pissed, he was defiant in the immature and sensitive way an umpire can be.
I’m not saying this to pick on Hernandez, even though CC Sabathia — who once said Hernandez belonged nowhere near the majors — would like me to. Umpiring is a hard job, made harder by the fact that baseball players are superstitious and have their own intentions on what to do when they go up at-bat. One weird strike call and Juan Soto is now counterfeiting the funk, as opposed to being up there with a pep on his step. If Hernandez misses a Gerrit Cole strikeout on the corner, and the next one goes into the seats because Cole is trying to get it to a place where Hernandez will call it a strike, then that absolutely affects who wins or loses. If baseball is judged by its umpires, then Hernandez retiring is probably good for everyone involved with the game. Bad calls lead to a lumpy game, and ruin the flow of the game, which is already without time to begin with. If the players read this, whether they are superstars or guys that got paid as much as Hernandez did, they would nod in agreement. There was no love lost with Hernandez; everyone had their issues with him, and judging by the calls that I saw him make in my lifetime, the players and the managers — guys who know what good umpiring is — would be correct in their assessment of Hernandez, however mean they were towards him.
Still, Hernandez contained multitudes, as every man — even the ones you disagree with — does. In 2017, Hernandez, born to Cuban nationals that immigrated to South Florida, filed a lawsuit against Major League Baseball for discrimination, claiming that Joe Torre — who was now Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations for MLB — has had a longsteading feud with him from Torre’s time as manager of the Yankees. The suit also claims that Hernandez had not worked a World Series game since the White Sox vs Astros matchup in 2005, and that was because he was a Latino man. Even though Torre vehemently denied this, and the suit was dismissed in 2021 by a federal judge, I always felt empathy for Hernandez after this. While a Latino umpire, Alfonso Marquez, a seemingly solid lad, was given World Series games that Hernandez wasn’t given, it is still possible to be both bad at your job and discrminated against. Maybe he wasn’t discriminated against — when a judge outright dismisses your suit, it does say something — but I am not devoid of enough empathy and understanding of corporate power structures to say that Hernandez was wrong to sue the league. Hernandez was a bad umpire, by all accounts, but to say that he can’t be discriminated against is to say that umpires of color have to be better than the other middling umpires — of which they are a few — that exist.
This idea — and this is very true, yet disappointing nevertheless — that men of color have to be two times as better to garner any empathy or understanding is to reinforce the white power structure. Hernandez might be a victim of that power structure, no matter how frustrating it was to see him have a strike zone that would only be deemed respectable in the movie Bad News Bears; no matter how upsetting it was to see him throw your favorite player out of the game for righteously protesting one of his calls. If you work for a corporation, and you feel that corporation is treating you unfairly, you can absolutely sue them — even if you spend time sleeping at your desk.
Every time I think of Angel Hernandez, I think of the time that Steve McMichael, a celebrity Cubs fan, was singing take me out to the ballgame and mentioned Hernandez’s awful strike zone. The whole stadium immediately started booing a visibly embarrassed Hernandez, who could only look up at the press box in annoyance and frustration. At that moment, he must have felt lonely and chastised. To be bad at your job and have people scream at you for it is not something I would wish on my worst enemy, if I can remember not to wish that when the time comes, especially when your existence is not supposed to accumulate that.