The appeal of umpire Angel Hernandez's discrimination lawsuit against Major League Baseball has been rejected by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, according to Reuters. It was a 3-0 decision on the bench and likely puts the lawsuit Hernandez originally filed in 2017 to bed.
Back in July of 2017, the Cuban-born Hernandez filed a lawsuit against MLB that alleged racial discrimination. Among the complaints in the original filing were Hernandez's lack of having been promoted to crew chief and lack of World Series assignments since 2005, notably under the leadership of MLB chief officer Joe Torre.
In the original lawsuit, Hernandez and his representation alleged that Torre still harbored issues with Hernandez stemming from a confrontation in 2001, when Torre managed the Yankees. Hernandez last worked the World Series in 2005 and has been passed over for a crew chief position five different times.
As of 2017, Torre's stance on Hernandez being promoted to crew chief was that he needed to "gain greater mastery of the official playing rules and replay regulations, continue to improve situation management, and display an ability to refocus and move forward after missing calls or receiving constructive feedback from the office."
In 2021, Hernandez's lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. District Judge. Judge J. Paul Oetken offered up an explanation.
"Hernandez's handful of cherry-picked examples does not reliably establish any systematic effort on MLB's part to artificially deflate Hernandez's evaluations, much less an effort to do so in order to cover up discrimination. The evidence shows beyond genuine dispute that an umpire's leadership and situation management carried the day in MLB's promotion decisions."
In 2022, news broke that Hernandez filed an appeal on the basis that MLB had manipulated evidence in the case, in part using the following argument.
"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 court ruling Tuesday noted that Hernandez and his representation have a case that there is "bottom-line imbalance" between white and minority crew chiefs, but that they failed to show a significant statistical difference in rates of promotion between white and minority umpires.
An important pillar in the case seems to be that there isn't proof that Hernandez himself has been racially discriminated against and, instead, MLB's argument that Hernandez hasn't been promoted on the basis of merit seems to have held up in the courts.
Torre himself, once in the position of MLB chief officer, has said that Hernandez has an "overly confrontational style" of umpiring.
Hernandez has been an MLB umpire since 1993.
