Ángel Hernández’s retirement gives MLB one less pariah. That's not exactly a good thing.
Weep not for Angel Hernández.
Hernández’s career umpiring Major League Baseball games,́ngelHerná a stint that spanned four decades, was to end Tuesday when he officially retired, reaching a settlement with the league that fulfilled a simple wish from fans coast-to-coast:
Go away.
It’s never a great day when someone loses their livelihood, whether you’re forced to walk the corporate plank, downsized into an uncertain future, or simply must confront the “What now?” questions that emerge once a life driven by a schedule wedged into your wallet is suddenly an empty calendar.
Within this context, Hernández is doing just fine.
Follow every MLB game: Latest MLB scores, stats, schedules and standings.
He reached an undisclosed settlement with MLB and, thanks to the strength of a union that fans deride when a guy blows a call, should enjoy a comfortable pension. There will be a runway, as he put it in a statement Monday, to spend more time with the family, a well-worn explanation anytime a public figure falls off the radar.
And there will be relief, even joy, from baseball fans as the worst umpire in the league (he’s not, but more on that later) ambles into the sunset.
But Hernández’s retirement represents more than just one suboptimal ump taking his talents to Del Boca Vista. It’s a significant domino to tumble in the game’s great race toward a homogenized, frictonless, almost conflict-free product, where games predictably end before your late local news and every pitch thrown, swing taken and strike called are optimized.
Like robots, you might say.
The automatic ball-strike system – MLB prefers to call it ABS, the people prefer robot umps – is coming. Not for 2025, commissioner Rob Manfred says, and perhaps only by 2026 in the challenge format that’s gained popularity in the minor leagues.
We are five years into the robo ump experiment, which was workshopped in the Atlantic League in 2019 along with banning defensive shifts and mound visits. The pitch clock was soon added to the minors.
All of the above have been implemented by MLB. Yet the quest for a functional robot ump that performs more reliably than the humans continues.
Meanwhile, it’s not a stretch to argue that calling balls and strikes has never been at a higher level in the big leagues.
We likely won’t ever see the tightly-held umpire evaluations MLB performs, but a gaggle of independent online auditors are out there, and it’s safe to say they’ve done a pretty good job reverse-engineering MLB’s grading system. My drug of choice in this arena is Umpire Scorecards, which, among other data-parsing techniques, simulates borderline pitches 500 times before determining whether a call was accurate or not.
The season is still fairly young, but the early batch of returns shows a highly competent field: Fifty-eight of 85 umps who have called balls and strikes this year have at least a 94% accuracy rate. Among umps with at least 10 games behind the plate, Alan Porter leads the pack with a 96% accuracy rate.
That means in a game with 140 called balls or strikes, 135 were dead accurate. It dovetails with the regard players hold for most umps in era when players can immediately run to an iPad for validation.
“I run into, maybe, two calls a game that are questionable," Mariners starter Logan Gilbert said in 2022. “I go back and look and half the time, I’m the one that’s wrong.”
That brings us back to Hernández, who is usually wrong more than once or twice on a given night. Yet in eight games behind the plate in this, his final season, he clocked a 93.2% accuracy rate. That puts him tied for 63rd among 85 umpires, alongside respected veteran Bill Miller. Rank and file, basically.
While he missed much of 2023 with an injury, his last full season in 2022 was similar: His median accuracy rate for 29 games called was 93.6%, with seven games in the high rent district between 95-97%.
The trouble with Hernández was when he was bad, he was pretty bad. A half-dozen games that year were in the bottom tier of 91% or less, with two games at 88%. That, too, matches the eye test: It almost seemed like bad calls compounded on each other with Hernández behind the plate, his rabbit ears hearing every boo and his mind, perhaps, imagining every online grievance.
Hernández did himself no favors with his body language, which took on a stance that exuded confrontation. He found little sympathy when he unsuccessfully sued MLB in 2017, alleging discrimination for his dearth of postseason assignments and failure to receive a crew chief assignment.
In a retirement statement, Hernández expressed pride that he was integral to “the expansion and promotion of minorities” since his career began in 1991. While Hernández’s role is subject to debate, there’s little denying that statement.
It’s true that nobody buys a ticket to watch the umpires. In that vein, a highly recognizable ump slipping off the radar isn’t the worst thing.
It’s interesting, though, how automation – in the literal and figurative sense – has wiped baseball clean. Thanks to instant replay, we won’t ever again have a moment like the should-have-been perfect game Armando Galarraga tossed in 2010, when first base ump Jim Joyce blew a call that should have been the 27th out.
We won’t forget the humanity that came from that episode, though Galarraga almost certainly would have preferred the perfect game than the notoriety. Then again, have you ever heard of Phil Humber? He threw a perfect game in 2012, two years after Galarraga’s near miss, and we forgot about it five minutes later.
It’s certainly a good thing middle infielders are far less endangered since the “Chase Utley rule” was enacted in 2016. It’s also given us, in essence, the automatic double play, where any crisply-hit, cleanly-fielded ball with a runner on first is devoid of tension and athleticism.
Instant replay has killed any need for a manager’s argument. The three-batter minimum has crimped managerial strategy, which took another broadside with the universal DH implementation.
See where this is going?
Sure, it’s hard to argue against justice being served from a video monitor in New York within two to five minutes. It’s equally challenging to object to an automated zone that eliminates the most egregious calls from a homeplate ump – even if the very best humans are for now proving more reliable than machine.
Yet Hernández’s exit reminds us the game needs heroes and villains, even if those designations can to some degree be narrative-driven. Those thirsty for online engagement will have to find another foil.
Was the game the ultimate victor with his departure? In the ultimate sense of fairness and accuracy, sure. But it now has one less pariah, a role that can’t be engineered or automated.
