The Athletic: Umpire Angel Hernandez alleges MLB manipulated reviews to make minorities look bad [$}

Sub required.

Hernandez claimed MLB has a history of discriminating against minority umpires, pointing out that as of the filing of his lawsuit, there had only been one minority crew chief in the league’s 150 years (Richie Garcia) — though that number has grown in the years since. There are 19 umpiring crews, each with four umpires, one of whom is a crew chief. In the appeal brief filed this week, seeking an overrule of the lower court judge’s dismissal, he also raised the argument that MLB not only looked the other way on its lack of diversity, but it altered the season-ending umpiring reports to justify this behavior.

“The District Court also failed to give appropriate weight to evidence of MLB’s disparate treatment of Mr. Hernandez, including evidence that MLB was manipulating the performance of Mr. Hernandez and other minority umpires to make their performances look worse,” the umpire argued in the court filing.

MLB during the time period covered in the complaint, 2011-16, performed midseason reviews of umpires called umpire evaluation reports (UER), and followed with year-end reviews. Hernandez said his UERs were glowing, but when it came time for his year-end review, the results did not reflect the previous positive assessments.

“[A] review of Mr. Hernandez’s Year-End Evaluations and his UERs for the years 2011-2016 reveals that MLB manipulated Mr. Hernandez’s year-end evaluations in order to make his job performance appear worse than it actually was,” he argued. “Mr. Hernandez’s Year-End Evaluations for the 2011-2016 seasons do not even come close to accurately summarizing Mr. Hernandez’s actual performance in those seasons.”