Angel Hernandez's Final Games Were Exactly What You Think They Were

Angel Hernandez retired in May 2024 after 33 years behind the plate. He was, by most accounts, the most polarizing umpire in Major League Baseball history. Fans despised him. Players tolerated him. And the data — four seasons of Statcast-verified pitch tracking — tells a story that is both exactly what you'd expect and somehow worse.

We have every called pitch from Hernandez's final 78 games across 2021-2024. Here's the autopsy.

The Numbers

Over four seasons, Hernandez called 12,223 pitches. He missed 1,085 of them.

| Season | Games | Accuracy | Missed Calls | BCS | SCB | |--------|-------|----------|-------------|-----|-----| | 2021 | 31 | 90.90% | 440 | 406 | 34 | | 2022 | 29 | 91.46% | 380 | 334 | 46 | | 2023 | 10 | 89.68% | 160 | 139 | 21 | | 2024 | 8 | 92.45% | 105 | 89 | 16 | | Total | 78 | 91.12% | 1,085 | 968 | 117 |

That 91.12% career average across these four years would place him consistently in the bottom tier of our era-relative grading system. The league average hovers around 93.5%. Hernandez wasn't just below average — he was reliably, persistently below average.

The Phantom Strike Problem

The most striking pattern in Hernandez's data isn't the raw accuracy. It's the direction of his misses.

Of his 1,085 missed calls, 968 were balls called strikes and only 117 were strikes called balls. That's an 8.3-to-1 ratio.

To put that in context: the typical umpire runs about a 4-to-1 BCS-to-SCB ratio. Umpires generally expand the zone more than they shrink it — that's normal. But Hernandez didn't just expand the zone. He annexed neighboring territory. For every pitch inside the zone that he incorrectly called a ball, he called more than eight pitches outside the zone as strikes.

This wasn't an aberration in one season. The ratio was consistent across all four years: 11.9-to-1 in 2021, 7.3-to-1 in 2022, 6.6-to-1 in 2023, 5.6-to-1 in 2024. He ran a wide zone every single year.

The Worst Games

Every umpire has bad nights. Hernandez had bad nights that redefined the category.

September 14, 2021 — WSH @ PIT: 81.72% accuracy. Hernandez missed 17 of 93 called pitches. Nearly one in five. To put that in perspective, the worst accuracy we typically see from any umpire in a full season's worst game is around 83-84%.

April 6, 2021 — HOU @ LAA: 83.56% accuracy. Twenty-four missed calls in a single game. That's not a zone — it's a suggestion.

April 24, 2022 — MIL @ PHI: 82.95% accuracy. Twenty-two missed calls. The pattern continued into his second-to-last season.

In total, Hernandez had at least 6 games below 85% accuracy across the four-year span — a threshold that earns an F grade in our system.

The Calls That Mattered Most

Missed calls aren't created equal. A blown call on 0-0 in the 2nd inning barely moves the needle. A blown call on 3-2 in the 8th inning of a one-run game can change the outcome.

Hernandez's highest-WPA missed calls tell the story:

May 5, 2024 — BOS @ MIN: Ball called strike to Wilyer Abreu on a 2-0 count in the 8th inning. VERY HIGH leverage. WPA impact: 22.5 percentage points of win probability shifted on a single incorrect call. This was his worst call in his final season.

May 20, 2022 — MIN @ KC: Ball called strike to Jorge Polanco on a 2-1 count in the 9th inning. VERY HIGH leverage. WPA impact: 14.4 percentage points.

July 4, 2021 — HOU @ BAL: Ball called strike to Jason Castro on a 3-2 count in the 8th inning. WPA impact: 19.0 percentage points.

All three were balls called strikes. All three came in the late innings. All three shifted the game meaningfully. This is the pattern: Hernandez's wide zone was especially damaging in high-leverage situations because an expanded zone in a big spot creates phantom strikeouts and suppresses rallies.

The Cumulative Damage

Over four seasons, Hernandez's missed calls generated a net home-team favor of +11.28 runs. That's tilted — most umpires land closer to zero over a multi-year sample.

His cumulative WPA favor was -6.45 — meaning his missed calls, weighted by leverage, systematically reduced the chances of the team that happened to benefit from his run-value favor. The calls that favored the home team in run value came in low-leverage moments; the calls that came in high-leverage moments broke the other way.

The Final 8 Games

Hernandez's 2024 numbers — 8 games, 92.45% accuracy — were actually his best season by the numbers. But the sample is tiny, and those 8 games still produced 105 missed calls, including the Abreu call that swung 22.5% of win probability on a single pitch.

His final game produced the same tendencies that defined his career: more balls called strikes than strikes called balls, a zone that drifted wider than the rulebook allows, and at least one call in a big moment that cost a team real win probability.

Was the Reputation Deserved?

Yes. The data is unambiguous.

Hernandez wasn't just "controversial" or "polarizing" — words that imply his quality was debatable. He was measurably, consistently, significantly below his peers across every metric we track. His accuracy was bottom-tier. His BCS-to-SCB ratio was an extreme outlier. His worst games were historically bad. And his missed calls in high-leverage situations produced real, quantifiable damage to game outcomes.

The 2026 ABS challenge system would have overturned hundreds of his calls. We know this because we've tracked every one of them against the same rulebook zone that ABS now enforces.

Thirty-three years is a long career. The last four produced 1,085 missed calls that we can verify pitch by pitch. That's the record, and it speaks for itself.

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See Hernandez's full profile and game logs on our umpire ratings page, or explore how we calculate accuracy and impact in our methodology.