Umpire Angel Hernandez responded to Major League Baseball in court Wednesday as part of his long-running discrimination lawsuit, accusing the league of a “hit piece” and “ad hominem attacks” for pointing out his three overturned calls in Game 3 of the 2018 divisional playoffs.
His reasoning is that those calls occurred after the 2011-17 period in which Hernandez is claiming MLB discriminated against him by not promoting him to crew chief or giving him World Series assignments.
“MLB is once again showing its true colors, and inadvertently demonstrating the veracity of Hernandez’s allegations against it, by selectively choosing ‘isolated incidents’ to demean Hernandez while it has repeatedly avoided doing so for the non-minority umpires it considered for crew chief and World Series assignments during the relevant time period,” the umpire’s filing states as part of his appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
“MLB’s Brief continues its troubling pattern of distorting Hernandez’s on-field performance, caricaturing it as inferior to the performance of his non-minority colleagues.”
A federal district court judge earlier this year tossed Hernandez’s discrimination lawsuit, in part because he found the umpire pool too small to deduce statistically whether the league discriminates in its umpire hiring practices. In August, MLB underlined the 2018 blown calls in its response to Hernandez’s appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
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