‘Social media firestorm’ led to umpire Angel Hernandez’s sudden MLB retirement

Congratulations, baseball fans on social media.

You helped pave the way for Angel Hernandez to retire and mercifully end his reign of brutal calls.

ESPN’s Jeff Passan said the constant social media backlash — which he said he contributed to — played a role in Hernandez ending his career after 33 seasons.

“A lot of that stuff, frankly, led to him going away. He got tired of it. He got tired of the social media firestorm that exists,” Passan said on the “Rich Eisen Show” on Tuesday. “Frankly, I will acknowledge this is understandable because there are parts of his job where he was genuinely bad. And it was magnified by the ubiquity of baseball on social media now. And how every time he would do something wrong, it would get put out there and then it would almost just compound upon itself, the last time, and it would bring up the Angel Hernandez highlight reel. You just had this echo chamber of Angel Hernández awfulness that, I think, in the end, wound up being part of his undoing.”

Hernandez started his career in 1991, a much-different era than 2024 where every single pitch and blown call can be seen by millions within a span of one minute.

Umpires like Hernandez found all of their blown calls scrutinized and highlighted, and with Hernandez there were plenty of “How did he miss that?” moments.