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On Sunday, before a grand finale of the regular season between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, the site Yankees Fanside complained about their referee behind the plate: Angel Hernandez.
“The Yanks and Rays have been endowed with the master of chaos,” wrote Adam Weinrib.
New York won this game 1-0, and all is well that ends well. But the fact remains that Hernandez isn’t particularly popular with baseball fans – and it looks like the San Francisco Giants are about to see him a lot more.
On Tuesday, the NLDS referee assignments were announced and Hernandez is part of the chosen crew. The full list is Ted Barrett, who will be the team leader, along with Hernandez, Doug Eddings, Pat Hoberg, Gabe Morales and Carlos Torres.
Typically, the best umpires are the ones you’ve never heard of. Hernandez, on the other hand, has an entire “incidents” section on his Wikipedia page. giants Fans on Twitter were less than happy when his name was invoked.
But is Hernandez really that bad by the numbers? Ump Score Cards diligently keep track of balls and calls throughout the season and concluded that yes, in fact Hernandez is pretty bad. Of the 90 referees who have called at least 10 games in 2021, he’s tied for the 12th worst accuracy percentage, 92.5%. He’s also prone to occasional duds among duds: his worst performance this year was when he only managed 86.3% of called pitches, the sixth worst among his peers.
Interestingly, however, Hernandez has stiff competition among his NLDS crew. Eddings matched Hernandez’s poor accuracy and Barrett wasn’t too far behind (92.7%). A 2019 Boston University study also identified Barrett as a Top 10 umpire in 2018.
Meanwhile, Hoberg was tied for second in baseball (95% accuracy), according to Ump Score Cards, Morales was on the edge of the elite (94.6% accuracy) and Torres was above the medium (94%).
The exact assignments behind the plate are hard to parse, but it looks like Hernandez will get a chance at some point, probably for Game 2. He, Barrett and Eddings are almost as bad. Which in theory doesn’t just hurt the Giants – it also affects their opponent, whether they’re the Dodgers or the Cardinals. Just a little more chaos to what already promises to be an intense series.
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