Usually, when we report news on retirements, it’s about a long-tenured player, or a multi-World Series-winning team manager, but the absolute biggest news of the week was the announcement that umpire Angel Hernandez was planning to retire.
Umpires bear a certain amount of negativity from MLB fans, but it’s usually about specific blown calls or bad country music albums. Angel Hernandez represented a rarity among MLB viewers: he was someone people universally agreed on, and they universally agreed to dislike him.
There are few characters in baseball who have such a mythos and legacy as Hernandez managed in his tenure.