Oft-controversial umpire Angel Hernandez alleged in legal filings with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that Major League Baseball “manipulated its internal umpiring metrics to disadvantage minorities, thereby excluding them from becoming crew chiefs,” according to a report by Dan Kaplan of The Athletic.
The 60-year-old umpire, who began working in the majors in 1991, claimed that MLB has continuously discriminated against minority umpires, withholding them from becoming crew chiefs.
A crew chief supervises the other umpires in his crew and acts as a liaison between them and the league offices. There are 19 umpiring crews that contain four umpires, therefore there are only 19 crew chief positions available in MLB.
At the time of Hernandez’s filing, the league had appointed just one minority crew chief — Richie Garcia — in 150 years, prompting the veteran ump to allege that MLB “looked the other way on its lack of diversity” and “alter the season-ending umpiring reports to justify this behavior,” per Kaplan.
“The District Court also failed to give appropriate weight to evidence of MLB’s disparate treatment of Mr. Hernandez,” the filing read. “Including evidence that MLB was manipulating the performance of Mr. Hernandez and other minority umpires to make their performances look worse.”
But independent analytics sites have also confirmed that Hernandez is a below-average umpire.
Ump Scores — one of the more noted sites that analyze umpire performance — rated Hernandez 53rd out of 74 umpires. He was ranked 47th of 75 umps in 2020 and 45th in 2019.
Yet he continues to get larger assignments, most recently getting calls to work the League Division Series in the playoffs in 2020 and 2021.
This is the second attempt in which Hernandez has tried going after MLB in court. He filed a discrimination claim in 2017, but a lower court threw it out in March 2021.
