Welcome to another edition of “Friday 4”, where I talk about the four things I’ve been thinking about the last week and the upcoming weekend in sports and the world.
ONE
I had planned on taking this week off, but sometimes something big happens that changes plans and that big something was longtime MLB umpire Angel Hernandez finally retiring.
At some point, every sports fan blames the officials for their team losing. Usually, they’re full of “you know what” and it was just their team playing like, well, “you know what” that caused them to lose and not any call made or not made by the officials. Sure. there are rare occasions where a blown call costs a team a game, but the vast majority of times a missed marginal call becomes the focus of a fan’s anger simply because they refuse to believe their team just wasn’t good enough on any given night. It’s virtually never the officials’ fault.
And then there’s Angel Hernandez.
No metric has ever been invented that shows that Hernandez was a good umpire. In 2023 Hernandez was rated as the worst umpire in MLB, making 161 bad calls. Oh, yeah, that was just in 10 games because he missed most of the season with a back injury. In case you’re not a math major, that averages 16 bad calls per game. He also worked behind home plate in, based on strike zone call accuracy, the lowest-rated umpired game that season in mid-September.
In case anyone was wondering if MLB knew how bad Hernandez was, they knew. He last worked a World Series in 2005. In 2017 Hernandez filed a lawsuit in federal court against MLB in 2017, claiming racial discrimination as the reason for his not getting postseason assignments and for his not being named a crew chief. US District Court Judge Paul Oetken ruled in MLB’s favor in 2021 in a summary judgment, and the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.
The scary part is Hernandez isn’t the worst umpire MLB has. The website Umpire Scorecards ranks Hernandez as 67th (out of 85) with a 93.2% call accuracy. The bottom three on that list are Alfonso Marquez (92.5%), CB Bucknor (91.7%), and Manny Gonzalez (91.6%). Those three, along with Hunter Wendelstedt, are the lowest for rated umpires in MLB.
With the Major League Baseball Umpires Association as strong as it is, and essentially the organization in charge of umpire discipline, there’s no chance any umpire is fired no matter how bad he is. While batters get three strikes before they’re out, umpires seemingly get an unlimited number.
At least until MLB gets some balls.
TWO
The Sunday before Memorial Day might be the greatest day of the year for racing fans. It starts with the Monaco Grand Prix early in the morning, moves to the Indianapolis 500 at midday, and then ends with the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte.
Monoco didn’t even make it a lap when Kevin Magnussen, Nico Hulkenberg, and Sergio Perez crashed at the back of the pack. Moments later Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon touched, crashing Ocon and ending his day. That worked out for Carlos Sainz, who had earlier pulled off the track with a punctured tire. He was able to get back into the race and ultimately finished third.
While it’s a great spectacle Monoco is usually a terrible race as there’s almost nowhere to pass on the narrow circuit, and that showed as the top-ten cars finished in the order in which they qualified for the race.
Then it was time for the Indy 500! Well, it was supposed to be time, but thunderstorms were in the area, and it was pouring at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The green flag is supposed to wave at 12:45pm the race didn’t begin until four hours later. With no lights at the track, it was decided the race would end no later than 8:15pm if they hadn’t reached 200 laps yet. Luckily, it made the full distance with plenty of time to spare.
Like Monaco, three cars didn’t even make it a full lap when a crash occurred between Tom Blomqvist, Pietro Fittipaldi, and Marcus Ericsson. Katherine Legge, the lone female driver of the weekend’s big races, was one of the next ones out when her hot pink Honda #51 blew an engine.
Indy is almost always one of the top three races in terms of excitement, and this year was no exception. It was a battle between two drivers over the last handful of laps, with Pato O’Ward and Josef Newgarden fighting for the lead lap after lap, with Newgarden finally overtaking O’Ward on the last lap to take the checkered flag. Newgarden celebrated by jumping out of his car and heading into the stands.
A dejected O’Ward, who also finished second in 2022, put it best, cursing on the live NBC coverage, “We had so many near-race ends and were just so close again…so (bleep)ing close.”
The rain in Indianapolis put Kyle Larson’s bid to race the double in jeopardy. After his 18th-place finish, Larson took a helicopter to the airport and jetted to Charlotte and the Coca-Cola 600, which had already started.
All I had to do was change the channel.
After watching such an exciting Indy race the boys in NASCAR were, well, a letdown. What didn’t help was that it started raining in Charlotte not long after I had turned over to watch the race. That did allow Larson to get to Charlotte Motor Speedway and get ready to enter the car started by Justin Allgaier. But it was all for naught as with the humidity they wouldn’t be able to get the track dried in a reasonable amount of time, and the race ended with Christopher Bell declared the winner.
That pre-Memorial Day Sunday is one of the two days I miss my dad the most, as he would have been glued to the TV watching the racing. Of course, that TV would be on the shaded picnic table in the backyard by their pool, but he’d still be watching.
THREE
I’m not sure how many of you were paying attention to the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) this season, but they just finished their playoffs where PWHL Boston in their glorious forest green jerseys lost to PWHL Minnesota 3-0 in game 5 of the Walter Cup Finals in front of a standing room only crowd of 6,309 at the Tsongas Center in Lowell.
It would be hard to call the inaugural season of the PWHL anything other than successful, although they do have some things to work on over the summer. The first thing is getting their teams some nicknames. “PWHL Boston” just doesn’t cut it. It seems they’ve already crossed that off their list as the league has said that names and logos will be announced in August. Redesigned jerseys will follow, and those who follow such things tell me that Bauer Hockey will be making those jerseys.
They also may need more teams. They’re currently at six teams, and with over 150 eligible players for this year’s draft alone, there’s more than enough quality players for two more teams. I know cost is a big factor here, but looking at attendance for this season the league really should be looking to expand for the 2025-26 season.
In one downside, I was unhappy with the merchandise selection. I would have loved one of those green PWHL Boston t-shirts, but they underestimated demand, and as someone who needs a larger size there was essentially nothing available for me after the first couple of games. I do expect that to be fixed for next season.
And since I’m being greedy, I need Cami Kronish (or someone else) to wear #35 in a game, so I’ll have an easy pick on whose jersey to get.
FOUR
Since I was planning on not writing this week and had to scamper for content, I figured I only had three this week. No big deal, I’ve done that before. But I stumbled into a video of Judas Priest’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame performance of Living After Midnight from 2022 and was in awe. In this video, Rob Halford was 70 years old. He is just a young buck when compared to guys like The Rolling Stones and The Who, but his music is a lot heavier than those groups.
And at 70, he still kills it. There are a couple of other vids from that performance on YouTube. Go and check them out.
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