A rare day where every team in Major League Baseball got a win: oft-maligned, criticized and widely accepted as the worst umpire in MLB, Angel Hernandez declares retirement effective immediately
When it comes to baseball umpiring, if people know your name, it’s really not a good thing. There’s a reason why baseball fans all seem to know the names of guys like Tim McClelland, Joe West, CB Bucknor, Laz Diaz, Eric Gregg and of course, Angel Hernandez; because these are guys who have at some point made such a colossal bad call or many bad calls, that they become infamous in baseball circles.
But Angel Hernandez, that guy was truly on a different planet when it came to bad umpiring. As a (terrible) baseball fan myself who’s seen his share of live baseball games, once I realized who Angel Hernandez was, his name alone, when hearing that he was behind the plate, or even umping anywhere on the field, elicited a feeling of dread and concern that he was most definitely, going to fuck something up. The real question was which team he was going to fuck it up for, and I could only hope that it wasn’t going to be the Braves or whatever team I might’ve been pulling for in a particular matchup.
Without fail, when he was on the bases, he would completely blow a check swing check, and call a strike on a batter who did not get the bat head past home plate, regardless of how much instant replay could refute it. He’d call balks on pitchers who were as still as statues, and at least one line drive would land foul but he’d call fair.
But it was behind the plate in which Angel did the most damage, calling way more pitches than most of his peers, inaccurately balls or strikes. Just searching for “Angel Hernandez” on YouTube would result in a parade of montage videos of him blowing calls, indiscriminately, and as the years have passed and vigilante watchers have been doing everything in their power to hold umpires more accountable, actual factual evidence of how bad Angel Hernandez was at his job has been materializing and painting the Picasso of just how terrible he was at umpiring baseball.
He has widely been regarded as the worst umpire there is not just by fans of baseball, but by the players themselves, whom there have been multiple years where Sports Illustrated takes anonymous surveys of umpire reviews, and it seemed like every time they did it, Angel Hernandez would be rated the worst.
Regardless of the ire, it’s widely believed that Angel himself loves the attention, and that he seems to be a proponent of the ideology that there’s no such thing as bad press, because the man has remained impervious throughout the decades of just how much he has been reviled by fans and players alike.
So needless to say, the recent development that Angel Hernandez is calling it quits and will cease to take anymore baseball fields immediately, has been widely regarded as the biggest win for MLB since like, returning from the 1994 strike. You’ll never see a day in which fans of rival teams will collectively come together in sheer solidarity at their general happiness that Angel Hernandez is gone. In locker rooms throughout the country are hitters who are overjoyed in knowing that Angel Hernandez won’t ever be behind the dish ready to call a pitch in the dirt, or a slider 8 inches off the plate a called third strike and ding their batting average. Pitchers are exhaling with relief knowing that they won’t have one out of every pitches right down the middle called a ball because Angel was thinking about money instead of focusing on the pitch on hand.
So with all this being said, I would like to propose that every May 27th in Major League Baseball season moving forward, should be acknowledged as Angel Hernandez Day, in which everyone in baseball celebrates the departure of the worst umpire in history. Like they do on Jackie Robinson Day where everyone wears #42, on Angel Hernandez Day, everyone could wear #55, or whatever his primary umpire number was. Or shit, even just retire the #55 for umpires in honor and good riddance of Angel Hernandez.
Obviously, this would never happen, because MLB is too high-horsey to allow themselves to get a little petty, but if there were ever a guy they’d like to dis-honor, it would be Angel Hernandez, who has attempted to sue his employer numerous times, claiming racial discrimination. Obviously, the man never brought any real evidence to prove it, and the suits have always been thrown out, but considering as part of his retirement, there’s a cash settlement, I think realistically speaking, Angel has been continuing to work over the last decade, solely to stay in the game of trying to sue MLB, and with all of his suits losing, and with the increasing scrutiny of umpires and umpire performance monitoring, Angel saw fit to take the settlement and take his leave, before he ultimately gets the axe in a mass layoff in the future.
Ironically, in doing so, Angel has manage to steal the spotlight one more time, and ultimately he wouldn’t really have it any other way. Dis-honoring him with his own day would probably be something he’d actually enjoy, which nobody wants to know, but if baseball really wants to become fun again, I’m sure there could be a tongue-in-cheek compromise to where everyone could be made happy and remember the joyous feeling of the day that Angel Hernandez left Major League Baseball, once and for all.
