The Angel of Doom was the face of baseball?An ESPN host said so.

By Jeff Kallman

The news broke on Memorial Day that baseball’s most controversial umpire, a designation you really have to earn, was retiring after negotiating a settlement with MLB. It went viral in better than record time. And it happened days after The Athletic published a deep and nuanced dive into the man versus the too-well-earned professional rep.

For what seemed half-eternity, Ángel Hernández was the No. 1 nuisance aboard baseball’s 10 least-wanted umpires list, and he’d gotten there the old-fashioned way —he earned it. The Angel of Doom earned it with flagrantly bad pitch calls, a kind of smirking eagerness to stir confrontations, and a non-existent sense that he might want to admit he was wrong when confronted with the evidence.

When it turned out USA Today’s Bob Nightengale wasn’t kidding around when he broke the news, it seemed 85-90 percent of the mood was happy-days-are-here-again. Rob Manfred may be baseball’s Public Enemy Number One as often as not, but Hernández probably had a tight grip upon Public Enemy Number One-A. Videos of his worst seemed going almost as viral as the news itself.

Confrontration: Buck Showalter, then Baltimore manager, vs. Angel Hernandez.Photo byKeith Allison, Hanover, MD, in Wikimedia

But then ESPN Radio host Evan Cohen threw a morning-after stink bomb into the ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead party. Cohen’s response to the Angel of Doom’s departure was, essentially, not so fast, are we really sure this is good for the game, because, you know, Hernández’s retirement removes the face of baseball?

Cohen’s co-host Chris Canty shot that one down swiftly: “It’s great for baseball,” Canty said definitively. “We don’t need to have the umpires being the story around every single game. Nobody paid money to come see you, Angel . . . It ain’t about the umpires, it’s about the players on the field. So, I’m glad that Ángel Hernández is gone.” But maybe not swiftly enough.

There are those who do think the umpires are the game’s faces. One of them was the late Hall of Fame umpire Doug Harvey, sort of, in his memoir titled (wait for it) They Called Me God: “We’re the backbone of the game, the game’s judge, jury, and executioner. Without us, there’s no game.”

“We should never know the umpire’s name,” said Cohen’s co-co-host Michelle Smallmon. Well, that’s not entirely true. When I was watching baseball ardently as a boy in and around New York, I knew a lot of umpires’ names, thanks to the diligence of the original Mets broadcast team of Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner, plus those manning the ancient network Games of the Week.

I was just as familiar with such umpires as Harvey, Al Barlick, Ken Burkhardt, Shag Crawford, Augie Donatelli, Chris Pelekoudas, Ed Sudol, Harry Wendelstedt, and Lee Weyer, as I was with Henry Aaron, Dick Allen, Ernie Banks, Yogi Berra, Roberto Clemente, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal, and Willie Mays.

(We could have just as much fun with their names, too. If we thought Weyer got one wrong, which wasn’t very often, actually, we had mad fun calling him Weyer Fraud. Al Garlick, Shaggy Dog Crawford, and Ed Pseudo got a lot of play, too. Just kidding, gentlemen.)

But I don’t remember any of those umpires becoming even a twentieth as infamous for malpractice as Hernández became. Those umps were the presumed adults in the room and behaved that way most of the time.

It wasn’t easy when confronted with such instigators as Leo Durocher, Billy Martin, and Earl Weaver. (That sonofabitch called me names that would get a man killed in some places. And that was on days I didn’t throw him out. —The late Steve Palermo, on Weaver.)

It was child’s play when confronted with maturities such as Gil Hodges or Walter Alston. They may have been human and may have made their mistakes, but those umps never really seemed to suggest up yours! was the proper response to being called out for them.

Doug Harvey’s smug pronunciamento to one side, most of those umps never once thought of themselves as the faces of baseball. At least, not publicly or in cold print. The owners had to learn the hard way (and often still do) that baseball’s faces were (are) the players on the field whom they could no longer bind and keep as chattel after 1975.

Let a Donatelli or a Pelekoudas go on the record thinking their breed were baseball’s faces, and you couldn’t set up a road block big or fast enough to stop them being run out of town. And maybe off the continent.

Too many umpires today behave professionally as though such road blocks couldn’t (wouldn’t dare!) exist. They have reason enough. Baseball’s government has long enough been wary of trying to impose accountability upon umpires within reasonable equality to that imposed upon players, coaches, managers. So has their union.

The World Umpires Association, the phoenix that arose from the self-immolating ashes of the original Major League Umpires Association (which immolated itself because of an attempt at accountability), is just as wary of considering that, just maybe, those among their clients who soil things for the comparative many should be made to answer when their errors become flagrant and voluminous enough.

Hernández wreaked enough damage upon baseball without going into retirement leaving even one observer mourning the loss of the face of the game. But if you’re going to be foolish enough to think an umpire is baseball’s face, consider this: Could we talk the Topps, Panini, and Upper Deck people into producing umpire cards?

Imagine baseball cards with the umps and their mugs on the front and their true stats on the rear. Where fans and others could see pocket evidence that they weren’t seeing things at or in front of the games. The stats on the back would (should) surely include accuracy rates, percentages of wrongly called balls and wrongly called strikes, ejections, and calls overturned upon review.

You can only imagine an Ángel Hernández card now. (Fair play: He’s said to be so nice off the field that he might have gotten a perverse kick out of being asked to sign one.)

But take heart. We still have the C.B. Bucknors, Phil Cuzzis, Laz Diazes, Manny Gonzalezes, Alfonso Marquezes, and Hunter Wendelstedts among us.

If baseball’s government and the umpires’ union won’t entertain accountability, maybe a baseball card maker could give them a big shove in that direction.

Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.