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For years, MLB fans have been looking for a way to get universally hated umpire Angel Hernandez out of the game.
They got their wish in 2024 when Hernandez announced that he intended to retire following a more than 30-year career.
But as it turns out, Hernandez wasn’t just bad, he may have also been working with a conflict of interest for at least one MLB star.
Nick Castellanos’s favorite umpire is probably not who you expect it to be 👀 pic.twitter.com/0qnUhq61mM
— MLBFITS (@_mlbfits) October 23, 2024
Angel Hernandez Had Major Conflict Of Interest With Nick Castellanos
Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Nick Castellanos recently shared that Hernandez was his favorite umpire to have behind the play. At first, it seemed like a classic case of Castellanos’ dry humor. But as the conversation went on, it became clear that he wasn’t kidding.
“I mean, he always called fair on me,” Castellanos began.
But it’s the next sentence that really raises some eyebrows.
“My dad was also his dad’s pulmonary physician when his dad was going through lung cancer treatments and stuff. So, you know, Angel always took care of me.”
Uhhhh, that’s a major problem. Of course, Hernandez is already retired. So he’s not going to face any sort of repercussions. But that’s probably something the MLB umpires union should have been aware of Hernandez probably shouldn’t have been behind the plate for Castellanos’ games.
Now, that’s probably pretty difficult. You can’t just keep an entire umpiring crew off of an entire team’s games. But there are genuine questions to be asked about Hernandez’s impartiality with regard to Castellanos.
Hernandez’s decision to retire was reportedly driven by online backlash to his regular mistakes.
“He got tired of the social media firestorm that exists. Frankly, I will acknowledge this is understandable because there are parts of his job where he was genuinely bad,” ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported. “It was magnified by the ubiquity of baseball on social media now. And how every time he would do something wrong, it would get put out there. And then it would almost just compound upon itself…
You just had this echo chamber of Ángel Hernández awfulness that, I think, in the end, wound up being part of his undoing.”
All of that would have been solved had Hernandez not so often been bad at his job. But now it also turns out he may not have always been on the level.
Let’s just say, Major League Baseball is probably better without him going forward.