Umpires are inclined to make headlines for considered one of two causes — as a result of they’ve blown a name or blown a fuse — and sadly for Hernandez, over the course of his 30 years within the main leagues, he has acquired a fame for doing each. The latter took years to amass, aided by a collection of high-profile tempests of all varieties — skirmishes, ejections, missed calls — culminating in a single nightmare sport in the course of the 2018 playoffs, when he had three calls overturned at first base. He was additionally on the middle of considered one of M.L.B.’s earliest replay-review controversies, in 2013, which is possibly why it nonetheless lingers — he dedicated the unique sin.
Throughout an in any other case forgettable early-season sport on Might 8 that yr, the Oakland A’s had been down 4-3 within the high of the ninth to Cleveland when the A’s hit what seemed to be a game-tying dwelling run. The ball ricocheted off the railing simply above the left-center fence, however the umps dominated that it had struck the highest of the wall, as an alternative making it a ground-rule double. Hernandez was the interim crew chief that day, so it was his job to go away the sector, retreat to a tiny closet within the bowels of the stadium and research a grainy replay. Hernandez wanted “clear and convincing proof” to overturn the ruling on the sector, which was inconceivable on the replay closet’s 17-inch Panasonic monitor, so he didn’t overturn it. Upholding the improper name was the suitable name, however he nonetheless was slaughtered for it. From then on, Hernandez was thought of a kind of embittered, antiquated umps who seethed at having to confess he was improper, even after we all may see it with our personal eyes, because of our vastly superior know-how at dwelling.
Lengthy earlier than this episode, although, Hernandez had turn out to be identified across the league for seeming a bit too keen to combine it up with gamers and managers, for making nitpicky calls, for drawing consideration to himself, a critique that retains popping up in media accounts from the period and even in his efficiency evaluations from his bosses at M.L.B. He and West had been kindred spirits, old-school hard-liners, and the older-school hard-liners who had tutored them had been blunt in regards to the guidelines of engagement with gamers: “You don’t belief any of ’em,” says Scott, who printed a memoir final yr referred to as “The Umpire Is Out,” chronicling his profession by means of this period as a principally closeted homosexual umpire within the large leagues. “They’re all out to get you.” This appeared to come back naturally to Hernandez. “Among the Latin umpires and the Latin gamers would joke round with him,” West instructed me. “He didn’t do any of that, and so immediately, that was a strike towards him, so far as the gamers are involved.” It was a strike in his favor, so far as Joe West was involved. “There isn’t a grey matter in Angel Hernandez. It’s both black or it’s white — interval,” he instructed me. He meant “grey space,” in fact, however that’s how issues at all times appear to go for Hernandez — even compliments have a means of backfiring on him.
West was Hernandez’s crew chief for about 5 years, till July 2011, when the league took the irregular step of splitting up a crew midseason as a result of, in line with West’s account of the reason he obtained from M.L.B., the duo had been “too robust collectively.” The league declined to remark, however the proof within the second suggests it was as a result of they had been tossing guys out of video games as in the event that they had been throwing fish in Seattle. Within the eight days main as much as the All-Star break, that they had 5 ejections, 4 of which had been by Hernandez. “There’s a distinction between dealing with a scenario with an ejection, and having an ejection and mishandling a scenario,” Reynolds says. “And in case your very first thing was simply to take the revolver out and begin taking pictures, or attending to that time the place [players say], ‘You’ll be able to’t discuss to this man,’ ‘This man’s not listening,’ ‘This man’s searching for an issue’ — when you develop that fame, it’s laborious to come back again from it.” (Reynolds was just lately rehired by M.L.B. as an umpire supervisor.)
Ron Darling spent each pitch of his 13-year profession negotiating the semi-haphazard strike zones of M.L.B. umpires, however his father was a highschool umpire, and he witnessed the abuse his dad absorbed, so he has a deep respect for them. The discourse round Hernandez, he says, “has gotten to a degree the place if he was good for 5 video games, nobody would give him any credit score. I believe he’s caught in, like, a time warp, you realize? He’s caught being authoritarian in a sport that hardly ever calls for it anymore.”