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USA Today Sports Media Group
USA Today Sports Media Group
Sport
Andrew Joseph

Stats show that Angel Hernandez truly had a horrific night even before Kyle Schwarber’s outburst

MLB fans saw the real Angel Hernandez on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, and oh man, it wasn’t pretty.

Just a few days after the much-maligned umpire put together a solid performance calling balls and strikes behind the plate in Boston, Hernandez had the home plate assignment for the Brewers-Phillies game in Philadelphia on Sunday. That game alone could serve as a case to remove Hernandez from the MLB umpiring ranks.

It was that abysmal.

By now, you’ve probably seen videos of Kyle Schwarber losing his cool at Hernandez after getting rung up on a clear, would-be walk. Schwarber could be seen telling Hernandez that he was making awful calls all over the place for both teams. And the Phillies outfielder was spot on.

According to Umpire Auditor, Hernandez was the worst-performing umpire of the night, missing calls on 19 (!!!) taken pitches and only calling 85.3 percent correctly.

He called this pitch, which missed the strike zone by 6.47 inches, a strike on Jean Segura.

Umpire Scorecards came in with a slightly better review of Hernandez’s performance, but it was still awful. They had him at an overall accuracy of 88 percent with 16 missed calls on taken pitches. But his inability to identify strikes was alarming. He called 11 true balls for strikes — a 77 percent accuracy rate.

While it’s an incredibly difficult job to call balls and strikes for MLB pitching, Hernandez is among the worst in the sport. A one-off respectable performance isn’t enough to wipe away years of incompetence. Sunday should have been a wake-up call for MLB and the umpiring union, but they’ve tolerated Hernandez’s embarrassing career for this long. It doesn’t seem like that’s about to change.

Still, MLB fans had seen enough, and they were awfully vocal about it on Sunday.

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