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At the end of May, Angel Hernandez announced he was retiring and baseball fans subsequently rejoiced due to his reputation as one of the worst umpires in the MLB. While he didn’t provide any concrete explanation for his decision, MLB insider Jeff Passan says the hate he was routinely subjected to online likely played a role.
Most fans know MLB umpires have a pretty tough job, and while the league has taken steps to minimize the impact of the human element of officiating after spending far too long resisting the technology at its disposal, those measures have still left a bit to be desired thanks to the issues they failed to address.
Angel Hernandez was certainly far from the only umpire whose performance left a bit to be desired, but the man who was statistically ranked the worst among his peers during the 2023 season (although it’s worth noting he only worked 10 games) was a lightning rod of criticism thanks to the impressive amount of baffling calls he was responsible for on a regular basis.
I’d argue nothing sums up the essence of the beleaguered ump who first started working in the National League in 1991 quite like the lawsuit he filed against the MLB in 2017. He claimed racial discrimination had played a role in his failure to be promoted to crew chief while being kept out of World Series games since 2005 only for the league to argue it was simply because he wasn’t good at his job.
He was nonetheless allowed to keep it for over 30 years, and during a recent conversation with Rich Eisen, Jeff Passan of ESPN suggested Hernandez finally decided to call it quits thanks in part to the backlash he had an uncanny ability to generate on social media thanks to his terrible calls.
Here’s what he had to say:
“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. And 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.”
Bullying is obviously bad, but if Passan is to be believed, sometimes it works.