“From the bench, blackened by the crowd
A muffled scream went up.
Like the waves of a storm crashing
On the distant and harsh shores;
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!”
Someone on the witness stand shouted.
And they likely killed him.
If Casey hadn’t raised her hand…”
– Ernest Lawrence Thayer
A few years ago, I asked a major league manager I’d come to know well about umpire Angel Hernandez.
“You know he’s producing a series? know He will fuck you once, and then he probably “I’m gonna get some f**ks after that,” he said, “and I’m just gonna pray to God that f**k doesn’t come in the ninth inning and lose the game.”
I reached out to that same person on Tuesday morning and asked if he wanted to revise that opinion in honor of Hernandez’s retirement from baseball.
“This is a long game,” he said. “Sooner or later, he’s going to lock you out of a fight.”
But here’s the problem.
Angel Hernandez was almost certainly not the worst referee of all time – in fact, whenever players and managers were anonymously asked to vote for the worst modern-day referee, he never even came out on top.
(Even if we didn’t win, we almost always placed or placed in a prize.)
But it was hard to deny on Tuesday. Google “worst umpire in MLB history” and the first 40 posts were about Hernandez. Within an hour of the announcement circulating early Monday evening, a collection of Angel Hernandez’s greatest hits quickly appeared, with more hits than the Rolling Stones, Eagles and Billy Joel combined.
But for 30 years, in an era when every pitch — literally every pitch — was available on video, it was Hernandez who had the misfortune of being unanimously voted the worst umpire in baseball. And whenever I saw a tweet or TikTok that began with “I can’t believe this call,” I knew before I even clicked that Angel Hernandez’s name was likely to appear there.
We can assume, for example, that Nestor Charak and Ron Luciano probably made some easy calls wrong at times, and we know that because there is actually grainy video of Billy Martin and Earl Weaver getting particularly angry over those calls. There are 10 umpires in the Hall of Fame (including Charak), and we have to believe that Cal Hubbard, Jocko Conlan and Hank O’Day probably had inconsistent strike zones at times, too.
We’ll never know.
We know every call Hernandez got wrong. All of them.
Plus, yelling at the umpire from the stands has long been one of the pleasures of watching baseball. The line that opens this column? “Casey at the Bat” was written in 1882, during what we would consider a much more genteel time, when spectators wore coats and ties and bowler hats, and women carried parasols on hot days. And even women wanted to kill the umpire.
Eight years ago at Citi Field, Noah Syndergaard threw the ball behind Chase Utley and was ejected from the game. This incident is best known for the famous “butt fell into the jackpot” tirade between Mets manager Terry Collins and umpire Tom Hallion. Here’s a rare and hilarious video. But I was in the stands that night, and for a long time, fans in the stands… well, actually kill Harion.
(Update: In the end, the Dodgers won, 9-1. After a while, the fans’ fighting spirit had all but died away.)
Other sports have umpires that fans frown upon. Scott Foster is a great NBA umpire, also known as the “extension guy” because he has a reputation that if the NBA wants to extend a series a game or two longer, he’s the man for the job. Rangers fans have called NHL umpire Kelly Sutherland an APB.
The late Rory Massimino once told me a story about how early in his career he lost a game, was berated by the umpire for 40 minutes, and in a fit of rage walked a mile back to the team hotel, only to arrive and find those same umpires toasting the home team’s coach and AD, then trashed the hotel room like members of Led Zeppelin.
(Editor’s note: This may or may not have actually happened at St. Bonaventure.)
So, no. Angel Hernandez is not the only person who was bad at officiating a sports event, and he will be missed by fans and likely his fellow referees, because he may have been the only person responsible for the robotic referees that will soon be part of the game. He just had the great misfortune of being bad at his job at a time when everyone could see how bad he was. Unlucky.
