Major League Baseball fans don’t have Angel Hernández to kick around anymore. A couple of weeks ago, he and MLB decided it was time for him to hang up his ball bag. Hernández likely will be remembered by many fans as the worst umpire ever to call a ball a strike. But I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment.

In Hernández’s defense, umpiring is a difficult job, especially when it comes to calling balls and strikes. The plate umpire must decide in a split second whether a ball thrown at amazing speed passes through a small window of space while also passing over a 17-inch surface.

Today’s plate umpires are under much more scrutiny than their predecessors from years past, as television coverage of games features a box that supposedly shows the strike zone. Therefore, every ball and strike call is immediately up for evaluation. There is even a website, Umpire Scorecards.com, “dedicated to measuring the accuracy, consistency, and favor of MLB umpires.”

From watching many games Hernández worked over the years, I will say that he did not appear to be among the best umpires in the game. But much of his unpopularity may be related to him being the T.S. Garp of umpires; he just seemed to have the natural ability to make people mad. (That’s a polite paraphrasing of a quote from the movie The World According to Garp.)

Criticizing umpires has been a part of the game from its beginning. The first umpire I remember by name was Ed Sudol, which I heard as Ed “Suit All” the first time the Braves announcers listed him as one of the men in blue. As a seven-year-old kid, I thought “Suit All” was an appropriate name for an umpire. But there must have been times when Sudol did not suit all, because he had 47 ejections in his 21 years as an umpire.

Many baseball aficionados are glad to see Hernández go, and while he may be remembered as a poor umpire, I cannot think of a particularly egregious call that he made or a game he worked that will live in infamy in the hearts of fans. He did not, like Ken Burkhart, call Bernie Carbo of the Cincinnati Reds out at the plate in Game One of the 1970 World Series against the Baltimore Orioles, even though catcher Elrod Hendricks tagged Carbo with his catcher’s mitt while holding the baseball in his bare hand.

Hernández did not, like Don Denkinger, rule leadoff batter Jorge Orta of the Kansas City Royals safe at first base on an infield grounder in the top of the ninth inning in Game Six of the 1985 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Hernández did not, like Eric Gregg, give Florida Marlins pitcher Liván Hernández an absurdly large strike zone in Game Five of the 1997 National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves that resulted in 16 strikeouts, the last of which came on a called third strike against Fred McGriff that was closer to the middle of the right-hand batter’s box than the edge of the plate.

Nor did Hernández, like Jim Joyce, rule Cleveland Indians batter Jason Donald safe at first base on an infield roller with two outs in the top of the ninth inning, denying Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers a perfect game.

Even the best umpires miss calls, not that anyone would consider Hernández among the best. But I don’t think anyone can point to a call he made that was as bad as these examples, so maybe he wasn’t the worst umpire, either.