You have to give the bare minimum credit, because this situation is running contrary to many horrible calls we’ve seen so far this year: at least Angel Hernandez admitted he screwed up.
But it was pretty ugly.
In the Royals-Indians game, Salvador Perez hit a fly ball deep to the track, and if you blinked, it might’ve looked like the center fielder caught the ball (and then maybe immediately flipped it to right fielder?). He did not catch the ball. It seems like most should’ve been able to tell he didn’t catch the ball. But umpire Angel Hernandez thought the ball was caught, signaled that it was caught, and then confusion took over:
Andrew Benintendi was tagged out but Angel Hernandez overturned the call without a review and no one knows why pic.twitter.com/ZfZYKkY8eR
— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) May 5, 2021
Once the crew got together to lay out what had actually happened, which included the Royals’ third base coach telling Andrew Benintendi to tag up because of the caught signal from Hernandez, they decided Benintendi, who’d been tagged out, should be granted third base.
After the game, Hernandez took his lumps and explained:
“Our goal was to get the play right, and that’s exactly what we did,” Hernandez said to a pool reporter. “We talk about this. Replay is an extension of what we do out there. As you saw, I got basically blinded by the outfield scoreboard. The pixels on the lights were as clear as white can be. I was trying to make out what happened out there. The harder I looked, the less I could see. So I was trying to read the players to see what they did with the ball. And I had to come out with the call. I basically guessed on the wrong call. So as soon as I turned around, (home-plate umpire) Edwin (Moscoso) started walking towards me. We got the crew together. And we fixed the problem.”
As you might expect, Indians manager Terry Francona was ticked after the game, and he didn’t hold back:
“I just kind of told Angel, ‘Why’s it always happening when you’re here?’” Francona said, per MLB.com. “It’s aggravating, but I don’t think there was anything we could do …. They said they put him where they thought he would have been. I’ve got to look at the rule. If the baserunner doesn’t actually attempt to get there, I’m not sure how you give him that base. But I was so mad at [Hernandez] that I didn’t even bring that up, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered.”
To be sure, it isn’t good that Hernandez screwed up the call in the first place. But it seems like he might not have been the only one who lost the ball in that section of the wall. Once that screw up took place, though, it seems like Hernandez did the best he could to undo the harm. He gathered with the crew, they came to (in my view) the fairest conclusion, and then he admitted it after the game. I know that Hernandez has a(n earned) reputation for getting things wrong a lot, but this was the right approach.