FanPost

Baseball News: MLB fans decide what to do about umpire Angel Hernandez

It had become a rite of passage. Perhaps even a tradition. Every new fan of the Toronto Blue Jays who got into the game was not to be told about umpire Angel Hernandez prior to experiencing his work, and if that fan was able to deduce without interference that Hernandez was awful at his job, he could be welcomed as a new honest-to-goodness fan of the team. Casual fans of the Blue Jays would never be able to tell how bad Hernandez was, but once you were on to him and his secret desire to undermine their favorite team, you became part of the club.

Except there was one small issue that these hard luck Jays fans didn't realize; every team in all of Major League Baseball had a similar club.

It all started one day when Hernandez and his crew were umpiring a game between the Blue Jays and the Royals. In the final game of the series, Hernandez was behind the plate and he was able to wrack up a pedestrian 19 inconsistently bad calls in a 9 inning close Jays win. Tim Dankers, writer for popular online Jays blog BlueBirdBlathering, happened to have tickets to both this series and the following one versus the Yankees, which was also being umpired by Hernandez. He followed the team down to New York and was surprised to see Hernandez there, and wrote an expository piece on his popular website. As luck would have it, one of the people who would read it was King Deedee Gregorious, the editor of the Yankees blog Pinhead Alley.

The gist of the conversation went like this:
"Tim, I saw your post about Angel Hernandez. I feel it was spot on. Did you know we have a secret club dedicated to how he screws up calls against our team?"
Tim, immediately realizing this as a delusional Yankee fallacy because everyone knew that the Yankees always had calls go their way, still responded with aplomb. "King, you know, we have the same club. What are the odds of that, eh?"
There was a moment of silence it collectively dawned on them. Tim realized that EVERY popular MLB blog had a secret club that was all about how awful Hernandez was. That was when the levee broke.

A few short hours and 28 emails later, their suspicions were confirmed. Every team had a club just like the one at BlueBirdBlathering. All of a sudden, it didn't feel so special anymore. Tim suggested that all the bloggers get together and sort out their differences, so a Blog-Con was hastily arranged to see what the various websites could do about the impending doom that was about to be unleashed upon their teams hurt feelings that they'd developed as a result of Hernandez' repeated blown calls.

The meeting was soon planned and would go ahead successfully, but the international uproar that it attracted drew the eye of people outside the blogging community. Fellow umpires CB Bucknor and Joe West both saw the gathering as a great time to promote themselves as viable alternatives to Angel Hernandez. Popular player / umpire Jose Bautista was told about it, but for once refused to comment. Commissioner Bud Selig was quoted as saying, "Umpire? What?" before deciding not to attend due to previous scheduled engagements at Swiss Chalet. It's at this point that I, R. A. Divel picked up on the story and went to interview the power players.

As it turns out, the much-ballyhooed meeting between bloggers was behind closed doors. The discussion raged for hours, and during that time I decided to speak to the other umpires to get their opinions. Joe West was the first to speak out.
"This game of baseball, ya know, they say it's about the fans and the players and the game and all that, but they don't know nothin', the game is about the Um-Pires. We control the game, we decide the game, we always have, that's what it's always been like. If we ain't in control, how can anyone notice us, and if no one notices me, how can I sell my new album?" Mr. West, already a popular recording artist, certainly felt he needed all the help he could get to maintain his numbers when Taylor Swift released her next album.

At this point, CB Bucknor interrupted Mr. Wests monologue.
"Joe, you got it all wrong." Then he pointed right at me. "You fans, I can see now what you don't realize.", Bucknor intoned. "Angel Hernandez, he's just an amateur. He goes by feel. You see him at a game, and he blows a few calls for one team, he knows he needs to blow a few for the other team next time, unless that team is the Yankees or the Red Sox like the commish says." Mr.Bucknor was waving his arms around now. "See, what you have to do is be professional about it. Me, I got me this app on my iPhone called Personal Umpire (P. U. for short) and it lets me track my bad calls, so I know when to screw up. 1 point for a missed strike. 2 points if I call a ball a 3rd strike. 3 for a bad fair or foul call that results in a run. 5 for a balk, and so on."

At this point, Bucknor was lost in his own world, staring at his phone for a minute while I stood in awkward silence. "P. U. is telling me I got some work to do. Next game I do is Yanks vs Orioles, and the O's are really in need of some screw ups so I think I'll balk home a Yankee runner all the way from first base. That's 18 points right there. Most games, each team needs to get about 50 points, but sometimes it's hard if the pitcher is like, Kershaw or something where he's actually good enough at pitching you sort of have to be accurate. But that can get you in trouble with the Union if you're too accurate too often, that's why we spread the good pitcher games out real thin."

Suddenly, the doors to the meeting room opened and all 30 blogger chiefs emerged. Tim Dankers, who was chair, stepped to the podium. "Dear fans of baseball. It became apparent to us that we weren't getting any especially bad treatment by umpire Angel Hernandez. As a result, we are closing down all the Angel Sucks clubs, and simply keeping a public counter to be updated every time he screws up. This is much less time and effort, and now we can start feeling bad about losing instead of bad umpire calls. This will help us all move forwards in this difficult time."

Later that year, I sat down for a game at Roger's Center. Hernandez was behind the plate. After the first pitch, a ball he called a strike, a giant counter in left field ticked up one. It now read "1,462", his error count for the season. We knew it would never get better. We were all ok with that. We all knew Angel Hernandez was the most inconsistently bad umpire in baseball, and now thankfully, it didn't matter. We'd gotten over that hump. Now we could just enjoy baseball again, Angel Hernandez or not because we all knew now, it wasn't just us. On the very next pitch, Buck Schowalter was tossed from the game. Maybe someone should send him a memo.

- R. A. Divel, reporting for The Garlic.

Editor's Note: This is a FanPost written by a reader and member of Bluebird Banter. It was not commissioned by the editors and is not necessarily reflective of the opinions of Bluebird Banter or SB Nation.