In Defense of Umpires (sorta)

Word came down this week that Angel Hernandez, the worst umpire in baseball, has retired. Despite his reputation, the numbers say that Hernandez isn’t actually the worst; an internal review by MLB showed that he was somewhere between the 60th and 70th best umpire, in terms of accuracy. That’s out of 85 to 90 umpires who call MLB games every year. So he was bad, but not the worst. 

Still, Hernandez was a longtime object of scorn not just for his incorrect calls but also for abusing his authority and bullying himself into the story of each game. There are tales of him ending a game with an incorrect safe call at home plate because he wanted to catch a flight home. He has been known to eject a player at the slightest provocation. And yes, he has made some egregiously bad calls. He’s far from the only umpire to do this, but somewhere along the line, he earned the reputation of “worst umpire ever,” and every poor call or decision he made only reinforced his legend. He’s the clown prince of umpiring, a designation that was codified by my friend John DeMarsico, director of the Mets broadcast for SNY, a couple years ago during a Marlins game.

Whether his reputation was deserved or not, it’s good for everyone involved that Hernandez has retired. It’s good for the players, assuming he is replaced by someone better (not a sure thing). It’s good for Hernandez himself, who can now fade into obscurity and probably be remembered with an exasperated smile rather than an angry frown. It’s good for the game, as having an umpire who is famously bad calls into question the legitimacy of the games, although I’m sure another umpire will take his place as the man everyone loves to hate. C.B. Bucknor, this might be your moment.

But allow me to take this opportunity to zag where others are zigging. I’m here not to praise Hernandez exactly but at least to defend his profession. This has long been a cause of mine, not because I love umpires so much but because they simply don’t get a fair shake. Look, there are people among us who believe we should move towards eliminating umpires altogether. They think umpires are bad at their jobs, and the game would be better if we used new technology to call balls, strikes, and outs. “Robot umpires,” they are often known as, and while the term pleasantly conjures up an image of Rosie from The Jetsons standing behind home plate, the result would likely be more of an amalgam. There would still be a human umpire out in the field, but their job would be to relay the results given to them in an earpiece by some sort of AI.

I think umpires are great at their jobs, probably better than I am at mine. Sure, it seems like they get it wrong more than they used to, but that’s only because we have the technology to notice it. We didn’t have high-resolution, super slow-motion cameras when I was a kid to definitively tell us if a player’s foot bounced off a bag for a millisecond or if a slider nicked the corner of the strike zone. Consider the first base umpire who, on a bang-bang play, often has to go on sound. He determines whether the runner is safe or out by comparing the sound of the ball hitting the first baseman’s mitt to that of the runner’s foot hitting the bag. He can’t even use his eyes. That’s how close these plays are. And yet he’s still right, more often than not. We get to watch replays from every angle. He gets but one shot at it.

Home plate umpires in particular have one of the hardest jobs in the game. They stand behind the catcher, their view partially obstructed, and must judge whether a ball—traveling faster than we have ever driven a car, slicing through the air, defying physics with its movement, rising, diving, and turning on a dime—has entered any part of a three-dimensional strike zone whose contours change with every batter. It’s amazing they ever get it right (Hernandez, for what it’s worth, called 93.5% of balls and strikes correctly in the 2022 season). Those rare occasions in which an umpire calls a “perfect game,” when, according to analysts, they didn’t miss a single ball or strike call? Such an accomplishment should earn the ump a Nobel Prize. Instead, they get a tweet. A spotlight is always shone on their failures, but their achievements are virtually invisible.

None of this is new. Umpire have always been an object of scorn. In Baseball: The Movie, I praise The Naked Gun for centering the umpire in its narrative, and note how they are almost always the villain in baseball films, even in situations when they’re actually correct. The umpire in A League of Their Own, for example, correctly chastises Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) for yelling at his players and, for his trouble, gets told he looks like “a penis with a little hat on.” Because it’s Tom Hanks saying it, we can’t help but think he deserves it. The same goes for the first-base umpire in Little Big League who is on the receiving end of a profanity-laden tirade by a 12-year-old but still comes off as the bigger jerk. The umpire is never the protagonist, and that makes them a villain in our minds.

Then there’s 1951’s Kill the Umpire, a film that demonstrates ump hatred existed far before we used slow-motion replays as evidence of their ineptitude. In that film, William Bendix (who portrayed Babe Ruth just a few years earlier in The Babe Ruth Story) plays an average joe who hates umpires and then, in a cruel twist of fate, must take a job as one after getting laid off. He learns that umpiring isn’t as easy as it looks. The movie is bad, but it’s a lesson we still need today.

I’ve always seen it as a noble profession. Umpires exist not just to ensure the legitimacy of the game but also because the game literally couldn’t exist without them. Opposing teams would never agree on a call, so each game would come to a screeching halt literally before it began. They have become objects of ridicule because we expect ultimate fairness in sports, a standard the rest of our life never comes close to meeting. In that way, umpires are scapegoats for all the world’s ills.

And yet we need umpires, even ones like Angel Hernandez, who are bad at an exceedingly difficult job. We needn’t praise Hernandez, but we shouldn’t use his ineptitude as a weapon to demonize his profession. Umpires aren’t perfect, but nothing is, and expecting baseball to redeem life—rather than simply reflect it—is just too much to ask.