– Is this the worst referee in the world?
Angel Hernandez has been enraging players, coaches, fans and TV commentators in US baseball for years. The league protects him, but what does he do? He sues her – twice.
Published today at 4:30 p.m
Always him: Referee Angel Hernandez is a source of plenty of discussion among the managers of the American Baseball League.
Photo: Tom Szczerbowski (Getty Images)
There, a mistake! And another one. Mistake. Mistake. Yet again. Everything is wrong, at least it feels like it.
Social media can be cruel, that’s not a new finding. But also entertaining. This is the case with videos by and with Angel Hernandez.
The native Cuban is 62 and has been a referee in the top US baseball league MLB for many, many years. For many, many years he has been criticized like no other of his colleagues. He regularly enrages players, coaches and fans with his decisions and sometimes even drives TV commentators crazy, who are asked to be neutral and reserved. “Are you kidding me?” someone once shouted into the microphone in exasperation.
Up to 150 missions in a season
Baseball is fundamentally a simple game, like many sports. One player, the pitcher, throws the ball and tries not to give the opposing team’s batter a chance to hit the ball. But if he hits the ball and it flies far enough and to the right place, then the batsman can run. If he makes it all the way around (also with the help of his teammates, who take his turn to hit), he gets a point.
The devil is in the details, however, and of course baseball has its peculiarities that are harder to understand for the untrained eye. But that’s what referees are there for. In US baseball they can gain a lot of experience over the course of their career; there is no other sport or league in the world where games are played so often. Each team plays 162 games per season. That’s 2430 games in total. Referees like Angel Hernandez complete between 135 and 150.
Hernandez is often deployed behind home plate. Its job is to assess whether a pitcher’s throw hit the strike zone. So, beware of the jargon, whether there was a “strike” against the batsman or a “ball” against the pitcher. Milliseconds are crucial here; the balls can reach speeds of up to 160 km/h.
The TV viewer has more help than the referee
What makes Hernandez the most maligned man in the entire league: He has a penchant for regularly botching these decisions. Unfortunately, he’s not just a little bit off, but usually 100 percent, there’s very little room for maneuver. And unfortunately, the “Strike Zone” is shown virtually on television, and every mistake can be seen immediately. The referee, on the other hand, has to rely on his quick eye.
That’s why angry fans regularly post videos of numerous throws on the Internet after the games, in which one wrong decision follows the next. Hernandez’s performance was particularly bad in a New York Yankees game last fall. The statistics counted 15 wrong decisions. At one point, Hernandez was a whopping 6 inches off the mark.
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The new season has been underway for a few weeks and Hernandez is back this year after an injury break of several months. But his form isn’t much better, as the first lowlight videos show, which have been popping up on portals like Instagram and YouTube at an even higher rate since the start of the season.
“The most notorious referee is back, and people are losing their minds,” was the recent headline in the Wall Street Journal, painting a highly unflattering picture of the critic: “His tendency to get himself into alarming situations with frightening frequency is bizarre.”
In addition, baseball referees often appear self-aggrandizing and their decisions are sometimes arbitrary. Recently, an umpire sent the Yankees coach off the field because he thought he had insulted him from a distance. It was a fan who was sitting directly behind him. “I don’t care,” the referee snapped when it was pointed out to him. TV microphones exposed the wrong decision.
In the case of Angel Hernandez, Major League Baseball is protectively behind him. By the way, he wasn’t particularly grateful for it. He has already filed a lawsuit against the league twice, in 2017 and 2021. Because he was last allowed to officiate a game in the World Series – that’s the name of the MLB final – in 2005, he, the native Cuban, suspects racially motivated discrimination.
It probably didn’t occur to him that it could be due to the performance.
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Allow cookiesMore informationDavid Wiederkehr is deputy head of the Tamedia sports department and writes about topics from a wide range of areas. As a sheet maker, he is also (co-)responsible for the planning.More information
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2024-04-26 14:31:21
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