Keith Hernandez maddened by ’embarrassing’ umpires for losing pitch count

Umpires had a rough night during the New York Mets extra innings loss to the Philadelphia Phillies and Keith Hernandez seemed fed up.

Aren’t there enough calls for Major League Baseball umpires to get wrong? They don’t need to start messing up the things that should be easy to control like pitch counts. But Monday night, they did just that, drawing the ire of Hernandez on the Mets broadcast.

In the top of the tenth inning, Mets pitcher Sean Reid-Foley threw a 3-2 fastball to Nick Castellanos that was high for ball four. On the SNY broadcast, the scorebug displayed a full count before the 3-2 pitch. After the pitch, Castellanos was appropriately granted first base, but it prompted the umpires to huddle.

Upon realizing the umpires were huddling because they weren’t sure about the pitch count, Hernandez was not pleased.

The umpiring crew lost track of the count on Nick Castellanos’ at-bat in the 10th and needed to review to confirm that Castellanos walked pic.twitter.com/Q5QiAkc1VP

— SNY (@SNYtv) May 14, 2024

“Oh boy,” Hernandez said. “You can’t be messing up…oh man. This is…What do you got an indicator for?”

Play-by-play voice Gary Cohen noted the umpires could get on the headset and use replay to confirm that Castellanos should be on first base, which they ultimately did. But Hernandez was still bothered by the gaffe.

“This is embarrassing,” Hernandez said of the umpires losing track of the pitch count. “This should not happen on a Major League level.”

Appearing on the San Diego Padres broadcast earlier this year, retired umpire Mike Winters noted he stopped using an indicator and keeping track of pitch counts himself in 1998. Winters continued umpiring through the 2019 season, relying only on the stadium videoboard to keep track of the pitch count. Which meant if the videoboard was slow to update, Winters would have lost track of the count.

Maybe that’s what happened Monday night. SNY’s scorebug displayed an accurate pitch count at the time of Castellanos’ walk, but it’s possible the Citi Field videoboard was still displaying a 2-2 count, causing confusion among the umpires. Even if the videoboard was incorrect, it probably wouldn’t have made Hernandez feel any better about the “embarrassing” umpiring gaffe.

[SNY]