Baseball just got a lot better

iveofione

iveofione

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Angel Hernandez retired today. Never was there a more reviled umpire or a less competent one. It is a sad commentary that MLB couldn't fire him years ago for under performing and he got to leave under his own terms. There are several more bloated, blind and belligerent umps that are the equivalent of a hang glider pilot trying to fly a 747. No mechanism in place to remove them.
 
Interestingly enough, Angel wasn't the worst at his job according to stats. I think it was just his combo of making BIG mistakes in big games, his quick ejection button for managers, and his ability to ALWAYS make the game about himself.

(EDIT: article may be behind a paywall)

www.nytimes.com

Does lightning-rod umpire Angel Hernandez deserve his villainous reputation?

Hernandez is a public figure in a major professional sport, and criticism is baked into officiating. But how much of it is justified?
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

When it comes to egregious calls, it feels as though Hernandez is the biggest culprit. But is he the game’s worst umpire? The answer to that, statistically, is no. According to Dylan Yep, who founded and runs Umpire Auditor since 2014, he’s ranked as the 60th to 70th best umpire, out of 85-to-90, in any given season.

“It sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and there’s also a lot of confirmation bias,” Yep said. “When he does make a mistake, everyone is immediately tweeting about it. Everybody is tagging me. If I’m not tweeting something about it, there are a dozen other baseball accounts that will. “Every single thing he does is scrutinized and then spread across the internet in a matter of 30 seconds.”

Even on April 12, the night he called Langford out on strikes, two other umpires had less accurate games behind the plate. Only Hernandez became a laughingstock on social media.
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Equally interesting, his coworkers all seem to genuinely like him as a human being. I won't say that I think he's a good umpire. But I do know that being a ref/umpire is an impossible task given all the camera angles and slow motion replays these days. I wouldn't wish that job on anyone.

And the amount of hate mail and death threats someone like Hernandez must get. The awful things his kids have to read about their dad from unhinged basement dweller keyboard tough guys.... I dunno. There are some very angry and very pathetic sports fans in the world.
 
@Josh he also filed a discrimination lawsuit against the MLB stating for racist reasons they didn’t let him into playoffs, though other umps of various ethnicities were in the playoffs…govt had to get involved and deemed it was just that he was incompetent.

He was the type of ump that I hate the most in baseball, the ones that make the game about themselves. An ump should be the most modest human on the field filled with humility and humbleness.
 
"Baseball just got a lot better today"

I gotta admit, when I opened this thread, I was hoping for some positive news...like, "baseball season shortened to remove 80 irrelevant games", or "baseball spring training/opening day postponed until AFTER NHL finals", or, "blisters no longer an excuse for baseball players to miss a week"...
 
Josh said:
Interestingly enough, Angel wasn't the worst at his job according to stats. I think it was just his combo of making BIG mistakes in big games, his quick ejection button for managers, and his ability to ALWAYS make the game about himself.

www.nytimes.com

Does lightning-rod umpire Angel Hernandez deserve his villainous reputation?

Hernandez is a public figure in a major professional sport, and criticism is baked into officiating. But how much of it is justified?
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com



Equally interesting, his coworkers all seem to genuinely like him as a human being. I won't say that I think he's a good umpire. But I do know that being a ref/umpire is an impossible task given all the camera angles and slow motion replays these days. I wouldn't wish that job on anyone.

And the amount of hate mail and death threats someone like Hernandez must get. The awful things his kids have to read about their dad from unhinged basement dweller keyboard tough guys.... I dunno. There are some very angry and very pathetic sports fans in the world.
Click to expand...

Your article is behind a paywall for me, but statistically he has been quite terrible. Over the last few seasons he has been amongst the bottom 1/4th with accuracy and one of the very worse with consistency, which is arguably a bigger issue during games.


Screenshot_20240527-220532.png
 
Poll: which of our PNWFF mods is most like Angel Hernandez. Go!

Seriously though, the fact that I know Angel Hernandez’ name and reputation as a non-baseball fan is pretty telling.
 
Josh said:
Interestingly enough, Angel wasn't the worst at his job according to stats. I think it was just his combo of making BIG mistakes in big games, his quick ejection button for managers, and his ability to ALWAYS make the game about himself.

www.nytimes.com

Does lightning-rod umpire Angel Hernandez deserve his villainous reputation?

Hernandez is a public figure in a major professional sport, and criticism is baked into officiating. But how much of it is justified?
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com



Equally interesting, his coworkers all seem to genuinely like him as a human being. I won't say that I think he's a good umpire. But I do know that being a ref/umpire is an impossible task given all the camera angles and slow motion replays these days. I wouldn't wish that job on anyone.

And the amount of hate mail and death threats someone like Hernandez must get. The awful things his kids have to read about their dad from unhinged basement dweller keyboard tough guys.... I dunno. There are some very angry and very pathetic sports fans in the world.
Click to expand...
Josh, you can't sugar coat it-he was bloody awful. And so what if his co-workers liked him? They weren't getting called out on pitches that were 3 inches off the plate. He was thin skinned and threw out guys that took exception to his horrible calls. I'm ready for electronic balls and strikes. During the week of April 8 umpires missed 942 calls with Hernandez striking out a guy on a pitch that was 6.7 inches outside. Hernandez may not have been statistically the worst but he was certainly the poster child for egregious bad calls.
 
The MVP of the Ump Show always had somewhere to go, and now those pesky balls and strikes wont get in there way.

It's one thing to fuck dog all day, its another thing entirely to eject players who let you know that they know why the dogs barking.

Baseball doesnt need umpires to make decisions that matter anymore. Ball, strike, safe, out, fair, foul..... they can all be done without human error. Umps can just be there to facilitate the game happening.
 
GOTY said:
and one of the very worse with consistency, which is arguably a bigger issue during games.
Click to expand...

iveofione said:
Hernandez may not have been statistically the worst but he was certainly the poster child for egregious bad calls.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I think these two were the issue more than anything (along with his obsession with being "the story"). As the quoted paywall article noted and GOTY's posted stats show, he wasn't the worst statistically. But he sure looked like the worst all the time and his demeanor did nothing to change that.
 
iveofione said:
And so what if his co-workers liked him?
Click to expand...
My point with that was more about the fact that, on the most basic of levels, this is a human being trying to do his job. A job that is literally impossible to do perfectly all the time and who's "customers" are bat shit insane about it. Maybe he sucks at it. Maybe he's got a crappy attitude. But the level and tone of vitrol sent his way was just disgusting (not by anyone on this thread, but generally in the world). Especially for a human who, outside of his job performance, seems well liked.

There is a segment of sports fans who think that being a fan means they get to say any damn thing they want without repercussion. The kinds of things refs have to hear, all the way down to amateur sports, are the kinds of things that would get you punched in the mouth anywhere else. Refs get literal death threats. That disgusts me and should disgust any right thinking person.

And it's only going to get worse with legalized sports betting. Robot refs had better show up soon or it's going to get ugly.

All that said, I do not disagree with your main premise. the world of baseball is better off without Hernandez behind the plate. No doubt.
 
Just one more thing before we put this thread to bed. In the 3 main professional sports in this country the umps/refs are basically amateurs that get paid a stipend for their services but get little in the form of actual training and in baseball in particular there are no physical requirements for doing their job. So many are fat slugs some of whom are too overweight to even bend over the plate. I have long maintained that those calling the games should be held to higher standards in much the way that the players are. If you are too old, too fat or with insufficient vision you should not qualify for the job. Add to that a short fuse, thin skin and a belligerent attitude and it is easy to see that some of these guys should be cut from the herd.

Professional sports now have budgets in the billions of dollars with some players making hundreds of millions so you can't convince me that there isn't enough money to establish training facilities for umps/refs that would produce fit young men like the players themselves and pay them enough to make it a career. I am not a huge football fan and don't take the game seriously but I, along with many of you, groan when you see who is reffing a game with your favorite team. Some refs call a shitload of penalties and the game never develops a flow, just a flood of yellow hankies for 3 hours. In baseball umps have been almost an afterthought from the beginning with a low bar having been set for their performance. The umpires union has assured mediocrity. Basketball is probably the most difficult to call given the size of the players and the speed of the game. In recent years the game has become more like rugby with some WWF thrown in and I simply don't watch it anymore. Back when Jerry West, Wilt, Kareem, Oscar Robinson, Larry Bird, Dr.J and others were playing it was a better game. Nowadays a ref with a chip on his shoulder can change the outcome of a championship game by T'ing up a great player or calling phantom fouls that keep a player on the bench.

Fans are the ones that support this madness, they should become more indignant and pro active, start some grass roots campaign to improve the quality of game management by refs/umps and hold the leagues feet to the fire to produce a quality product. Back when a family of 4 could go to a MLB game for around $50 maybe bad umps were just the price of admission but nowadays the average price of a game can run from about $160 to over $300. Fifty dollar umps don't cut it anymore.
 
Statistically he has been one of the worst umpires in the league (bottom 1/4th for accuracy). Not the absolute worst, but one of the worst. This is after 30 years on the job. Most companies would look to fire employees that underperform that badly. Especially when there are less than 100 of them in the world. This should be a competitive job for high performers (the best of the best), not some long term underperformers who constantly make the company look bad.

Or maybe a different way to look at it: any MLB player that was as statistically poor at baseball as Angel was at calling balls and strikes on a peer relative basis (negative WAR essentially) would have been out of a job quite quickly. I sympathize a bit with players on this one since it's such a double standard. Especially when those terrible calls impact their own job.

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