Monday afternoon was a day to forget for umpire Hunter Wendelstedt. He ended up failing in just about every aspect you’d expect from a home plate umpire.
Wendelstedt — who was working behind the plate for the Yankees’ game against the A’s — ejected Aaron Boone over what appeared to be comments made by a fan in the stands. Boone had been warned about chirping after the first at-bat of the game. And though the Yankees manager heeded the warning and stayed quiet, a fan shouted at Wendelstedt to draw the ejection on Boone. After the game, Wendelstedt made matters worse by refusing to admit his mistake.
Boone was understandably in disbelief because that was just awful umpiring from Wendelstedt.
But it turned out that Wendelstedt’s bad day was just getting started.
According to Umpire Scorecards, Wendelstedt had himself an atrocious 89 percent accuracy on ball-strike calls and 68 percent on strike accuracy. He missed 16 taken pitches total on the day and basically expanded the left-handed zone by a couple inches.
To put that score in perspective, that was the 10th-worst game out of the 341 games scored this season. Wendelstedt also had the seventh-worst game from April 2 between the Cardinals and Padres.
There’s really no excuse for a terrible all-around game like that. And in any normal working environment, Wendelstedt would face some kind of consequences for the poor performance. But this is MLB, so we should probably expect to see Wendelstedt back out there in the coming days.
That didn’t stop fans from ripping the ump for the inexcusable effort.
