Umpire Ángel Hernández claims Major League Baseball discriminated against minority umpires by altering its internal evaluations to not give them opportunities to be crew chiefs, The Athletic’s Daniel Kaplan reports.
The claim stems from Hernández’s suit against MLB, which has reached the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He first filed the suit in 2017—which was then dismissed in 2021—where he accused the league of discrimination by not promoting him to crew chief.
Hernández argued that, at the time of the suit, there was only one minority crew chief in MLB's 150-year history. MLB has 19 total umpiring crews per year, and the number of minority crew chiefs has increased since the suit was filed. The league promoted its first African-American and second Latino crew chief in 2020.
