Atlanta Braves interim Manager Brian Snitker, left, reacts as he is ejected by umpire Angel Hernandez on July 19, 2016, in Cincinnati.Gary Landers/The Associated Press
It’s impossible to pick the single worst call made by umpire Ángel Hernández – there are so many – but the most amusing was the ejection of Steve ‘Mongo’ McMichael.
Hernández, who retired mid-baseball-season on Monday, ejected a million guys over the course of his career. His hair trigger had been pulled so many times that it was bald.
But McMichael was a special case because he wasn’t a baseball manager or a baseball player or a baseball anything. He had played football for the Chicago Bears.
Years back, they invited him to lead Cubs fans in song during the seventh-inning stretch. Standing there with a beer in one hand and a mic in the other, McMichael shouted. “Don’t worry, I’ll have some speech with that home-plate umpire after the game.”
Here’s a couple of good rules about life – you don’t pick fights with 350-pound men they call Mongo, and you don’t get to tell the customers how they can feel. But Hernández was never bound to the norms of the entertainment business.
(Later, Hernández would say that the hadn’t ejected McMichael, but had complained to the crew chief, who had security eject him. That explanation ought to be added to Hernández’s greatest hits.)
Hernández did it all over the course of a 30-plus-year career in Major League Baseball. He missed tags, slides, touched bases, caught flies. You name it, he missed it. His spécialité de la stadium was the unswung-on ball just outside the zone.
The rule book says the strike zone is “the area over home plate from the midpoint between a batter’s shoulders and the top of the uniform pants.”
For Hernández, the strike zone sometimes extended from one dugout to the other. Or from a point one inch below the dirt to the highest point you can reach on tippy toes. Or the radius of a bottle cap. It was hard to tell on a given night.
Hernández practically invented that thing where batters stare blankly toward centre field for 10 long seconds after they have been called out on strikes because they can-NOT believe what has just happened. Or that one where the pitcher has a mound conniption because he’s just walked another one with a pitch so directly down the middle that it could be campaigning.
For the first two decades of Hernández’s career, instant replay was a blunt tool used sparingly by licensed broadcasters. Then the computer wonks turned it into a stiletto anybody could stab you with. At that point, Hernández became whatever the opposite of a folk hero is.
In one 2018 American League Divisional Series game, Hernández had three calls at first base overturned by replay in the first four innings. Later in the same series, Yankees pitcher C.C. Sabathia put the first of many shanks in him.
“I don’t think Ángel Hernández should be ump’ing playoff games. He’s absolutely terrible. Terrible behind the plate today. Terrible at first base.”
At that point, Hernández was already in the middle of a racial-discrimination lawsuit against MLB because he hadn’t officiated a World Series game in over a decade. He lost. Including on replay.
Under this sort of pressure to change, most people would bend a little. Not Hernández. If anything, his calls were getting more out there.
He missed most of 2023 through injury, but was back with a cock-eyed vengeance this year.
In April, he called Texas Ranger Wyatt Langford out on three taken strikes. All three were well outside what anyone would consider the zone. The third of them was seven inches wide – apparently the worst missed-strike call since they began measuring such things.
That game and the resultant conversation was some sort of tipping point. By early May, Hernández was AWOL. On Monday, he quit. His lawyer told The Athletic via text that Hernández “was NOT forced out.”
Sure.
The reason they still employ human referees is not so they can get it right every time. It’s so they can occasionally get it wrong, and then the rest of us have something to yell at each other about.
The key word there is “occasionally.” Someone who regularly blows easy decisions is putting the operation in peril.
No sport is more vulnerable to the call for robot officiating than baseball. So little of it is subjective, while all of it is incredibly difficult to get right in real time.
Did the ball enter the fielder’s glove before the runner’s cleat grazed the bag? Define ‘enter the glove.’ Then tell me exactly what constitutes ‘touched the bag.’ And then tell me how you can be looking at two spots six feet apart at the same time.
On very close calls, a human umpire is guessing. An AI umpire won’t have to.
Hernández, only the age of 62 and still pretty spry, was putting an entire profession in jeopardy. He was a nightly reminder of how flawed human perception is. With the advent of the manager’s challenge, he was single-handedly combatting baseball’s institutional push to shorten games.
Most importantly, he was generating the sort of discussion that is not fun anger, but real anger.
At a guess, the people who really wanted Hernández gone were his colleagues. MLB employs about 70 umpires. It pays the most experienced of them a half-million bucks a year.
Currently, there is no fan- or owner-led groundswell to replace them, but as long as Hernández was at work, that was a constant low-grade risk. Why take any risk at all?
Personally, I will miss Ángel Hernández. Whenever you saw his name on the scorecard, the potential that the game you were about to cover could go from one-of-162 to one people won’t forget shot up. He made news more reliably than the vast majority of players he oversaw.
And however bad he was, he spread the pain around evenly. You could say worse things about a man once he’s gone.