Yer Out! Ángel Hernández Gets the Ultimate Ejection

I’ve been obsessed with Ángel Hernández’s retirement all week, how about you?

We’ve all seen endless clips of his greatest fails, so I won’t bother with any of that. It was fun to hear what some of his player-critics had to say about his retirement, though. Two stories caught my attention in particular.

• That his infamous miscall at the plate which wrongly concluded an extra-innings Mets/Braves game in July 1998 was because they “needed to move the game along” because he had “a plane to catch.” That’s a story circulated by Bobby Valentine, John Franco, Mike Piazza and other Mets players, and if true, that’s a mindblower.
• Will Clark unknowingly bought him off with a beer or two, and had a really small, hitter-friendly strike zone for the rest of his career when Hernández worked home plate. Who knew—life is cheap in Major League Baseball!

There was a sort of genius (of the stubborn, doubling-down variety, to be sure) to Hernández ’s terribleness. How can someone be so bad at something they love, have presumably trained extensively for, and yet seemingly not try to improve? (To anyone who’s ever heard me sing in the car, and feels like they have something to say right now, you can zip it.)

This is an existential question that I can’t begin to answer, but it’s occupied me all week.

He was certainly a complicated guy.

By many accounts Hernández was a “sweetheart.” He said in his public statement that he loved his job, something which truly shocked me. I’d assumed that he was gritting his teeth through every game, barely hanging on, and counting the days until it was all over. I once had a coworker who hated their job and crossed off each completed workday on the wall calendar. They did it with a grim and bitter satisfaction, like a prisoner etching hatchhmarks on the wall of a cinderblock cell in a movie. That wasn’t the case with Hernández, apparently.

He mentioned his wife and daughters in his retirement statement. Are they proud of him, despite all his failings? I really want to know. I don’t mean that sarcastically. Maybe they are. His retirement statement seemed to indicate that he was proud of himself.

Or the opposite? Could they be proud in any way for knowing that he was the best at being the worst? In college, late at night sometimes, people would sit around and tell outlandish stories about things their families said or did. I could often win this game, even when I didn’t want to, but what about Hernández’s kids? Is there a perverse pride in saying My Dad Was the Absolute Worst (although the data actually says he wasn’t) And You Can’t Take That Away From Him?

After all, he spent decades in this profession, and some days, his name was on everyone’s lips. Not many people can say that.

Hernández himself thought he did a good job, and launched lawsuits that alleged racial discrimination, not sub-par job performance, was the reason for his not being awarded more high-profile (and presumably high-paying) assignments like post-season games. I firmly believe that systemic problems have held back plenty of folks in baseball and beyond. They are an issue we need to take seriously and resolve, full stop. But were they an issue here? Did Hernández really never look in the mirror or review his own calls? Change his stance if he couldn’t see? Stop insisting he was right when he wasn’t?

There will never be another terrible Hernández call to rally around, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. Isn’t that weird? I mean, he was a total menace on the field, in terms of getting things right, but I also feel a little wistful…like one of the things that makes baseball the most bizarre and oddly lovable sport in the universe has packed up and left too.

Personally, I’m someone who likes to get things right, who tries to get things right as much as I can. So this is a really strange feeling.

It’s been clear for a while that robo umps, as well as bad feelings and vitriolic tweets, would be his main legacy.

Maybe I’m reacting to the Artificial Intelligence of it all, mourning something of a human fingerprint that is receding in our lives, even in ways we can’t fully comprehend now but can sense somewhere on the horizon. I’m not anti-technology at all but I work with words and images, and those worlds have been so clearly impacted, perhaps even made vulnerable, depending on your perspective. Maybe I’m just caught up in some kind of yearning for the human touch which seems to be slipping away. Having fallible—ridiculously fallible, obnoxiously human—umpires was one way to forget about that, even though we’ve seen robo umps advancing for some time now.

There’s a sort of fun in rooting against something sometimes, and Ángel Hernández was definitely the villain we love to hate. Did you ever love a TV show, but hated one of the main characters, one who wasn’t even designed to be the bad guy? I mean, like really, truly hated: everything they did seemed to antagonize the other characters, and maybe the actor was even annoying in real life too. My favorite example is Beverly Hills, 90210. (Yes, I said it!) Everyone I knew who watched the show complained about Brenda Walsh (played by Shannen Doherty) and that’s an understatement. She was awful, and we wanted her gone. Well, one day she was gone…but the show was never the same. We missed her, along with her tension and drama. That was a big surprise, I can tell you. Maybe it’s human nature to need to align ourselves against something, to show what we don’t stand for, as much as what we do.

Oh well, at least we still have the Yankees for that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been watching clips of Hernández’s mistakes all week and hooting in derision. And I’m not saying that he should have kept his job.

I recognize the contradictions in myself. Walt Whitman, and Ángel Hernández, and myself, and all of us, are large, and we contain multitudes. Maybe that’s the answer.