Goodbye and good riddance, Angel

[bmfc1]

In news that everyone can agree on, Angel Hernandez is retiring on Tuesday:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/m ... 873676007/

[Frayed Knot]

Odd mid-season retirement ... which means there's some back story going on here.

[Edgy MD]

I think it's probably simply a matter of paying him to go away.

[metirish]

No more Angel in the outfield

[Marshmallowmilkshake]

I had not realized he had not officiated a game since May 9.

[Gwreck]

I think it's probably simply a matter of paying him to go away.

Precisely.

MLB and Hernández had spent the past two weeks negotiating a financial settlement before reaching a resolution over the weekend.

[Frayed Knot]

So with Joe West and now Angel Hernandez gone, who takes over the title of MLB's worst ump?
C. B. Bucknor comes to mind.

[MFS62]

About effing time.
The IN-COM-PE-TENT cheer will have to be put aside for a while.

Later

[Cowtipper]

C.B. Bucknor should be next.

[metirish]

I've always got the feeling that Angel was actually well liked within the game , not his game calling the last several years , but him personally

[Frayed Knot]

I've always got the feeling that Angel was actually well liked within the game , not his game calling the last several years , but him personally

That's exactly what I read just recently (don't remember where).
A friendly, likable guy who just drove everyone nuts with his erratic umpiring.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

And I read somewhere that the numbers show he's an average ump, just one with a tendency to blow obvious calls

[Edgy MD]

C.B. Bucknor is a bad ump. Erratic.

Joe West was a proud ump. With a chip on shoulder. If you complain about one call, he's going to make sure you don't get the next call. And probably one after that. Old man pride is a bad form of pride.

Angel was a combination of the both. Erratic as heck and willing to fuck with you if you called him on it. If he was well-liked, I didn't see it. Certainly not from managers.

Bucknor has a bit of a chip on his shoulder also. He's a big, strong guy and doesn't like the little guys shit-talking him. But at the end of the day, he gets to be a big guy with all the perks of that, so he doesn't have as much to prove.

So he's probably not the worst ... yet. I think his badness just stands out a little more because he's great, big C.B. But he strikes me as a decent enough guy mostly trying to do his job well, and failing. Mostly.

My candidates: Laz Diaz — bizarre calls and hates to be questioned. A smarter, but possibly meaner, version of Angel.

Hunter Wendlestadt — he's only in his early 50s but he's got the whiff of old man pride. He started young and has been around for a while, plus he's a legacy. And he's here to let you know that if you don't like his shit, it doesn't matter. He'll still be here when you're gone and forgotten.

In the end, I'm going to go with Brian O'Nora. He's got one of those Angel Hernandez skill sets where a bad call or two can cascade into an utter meltdown of a game, where things get worse and worse. He's like the player who is having a bad game on defense but the ball keeps finding him. Plus he's got into some creepy, shadowy trouble with the law and somehow it blew over. He strikes me as not really as old as he looks, as if he's got a really unhealthy lifestyle.

I've written some speculation about him, but just deleted it, but I think something is afoot there and he's going to end up in the papers in a bad way.

[metirish]

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/402 ... z-retiring

Jeff Passan

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Ooh, replaced by Jacob Metz. We'll get all the calls when he works

[MFS62]

Joe West was a proud ump. With a chip on shoulder. If you complain about one call, he's going to make sure you don't get the next call. And probably one after that. Old man pride is a bad form of pride.

My friends and I used to say that about Lee Weyer. We called him 'The bully". He used his imposing physical size to intimidate managers during arguments, leaning close and towering over them in face to face situations..
Didn't stop him from being elected to the Hall of Fame, though.

Later

[Edgy MD]

There are few umps in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and they don't get in through election.

Lee Weyer, however, is not one of them.

[ashie62]

Hernandez was repeatedly calling strikes on obvious ball on Texas Ranger rookie Wyatt Lanford in 4/12/24

Goodbye and good riddance

[Edgy MD]

"Are we trying?"

[ashie62]

I don't separate this behavior from drum banging in Houston

Hernandez he was near the end of umpiring for the rest of his life and took this moment to be willingly vindictive

[bmfc1]

It would be... something if one of the networks hired him as the "Rules Expert".

[metirish]

It would be... something if one of the networks hired him as the "Rules Expert".

Surely FOX will

[nymr83]

Worst umpire in the game and it's not even close. Happy that he will never ever work another Mets game.

[Edgy MD]

Gary described Hernandez today as "being more or less in the middle of the pack" with regard to umpire ratings.

Perhaps he was being gracious, perhaps wishful, or perhaps accurate, but I'd sure like to see what ratings he's referencing.

[nymr83]

I don't know that MLB makes their ratings publicly available, they are probably embarrassed to do so.

These guys rate the umps and their data is public: https://umpscorecards.com/info/

If you scroll down you'll see how they define a bunch of stats.

I'll pick out these two as somewhat meaningful:

AAx (Accuracy Above Expected) - The difference between actual accuracy and expected accuracy.
Con (Consistency) - The percent of calls inconsistent with the established umpire zone.

Go to 'Umpires' https://umpscorecards.com/umpires/

Change the data set to go all the way back to 1901 (I think it goes back to 2018?) i just picked an earlier date as i wasn't sure.

They have data on 132 umpires, though some are of course only a few games.

Hernandez is the 34th worst in "Accuracy Above Expected"

He is the 17th worst in "Consistency" (ie, he can't even call his 'own' established strike zone properly)

if you sort those two lists and add the rankings together, he is the 23rd worst of 132.



Fans are at the park to see the players, not the umpires, so I'd say part of their job is NOT to eject players wherever possible:

Retrosheet credits him with 99 ejection
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/H/Pherna901.htm


you can download their full database here: https://www.retrosheet.org/eject.htm

99 ejections ranks him 41st of over 500 umpires (with at least 1 ejection) in MLB history (19K+ ejections dating to 1889)

He ranks 12th of 251 umpires (with at least 1 ejection) in ejections since 1980 if you want to put it more into the context of his career.

Retrosheet categorizes ejections for different reasons. One of those categories is "Fighting" - lets assume anyone who was fighting (or 'Brawl') deserved their ejection, if we take those out he moves up to 8th

He is second to the infamous "balking Bob" Davidson in ejections for Balks (that is a weird one!)




Any description of him as "being more or less in the middle of the pack" is therefore pretty generous. he is somewhere in the bottom quartile, at best.