Umpire Hernández asks court to reinstate lawsuit against MLB

Angel Hernandez’s lawyers maintain that major leagues tampered with the assessments of that ruling, for which they asked to reopen a racial discrimination lawsuit that the court did not agree with last year.

The attorneys’ confirmation is included in a document filed Tuesday with the United States’ Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which seeks to overturn the summary ruling of Judge J. Paul Utkin who favored Major League baseball in March 2021.

Cuban Hernandez was appointed as the league’s main referee in 1993. In 2017, he filed a lawsuit arguing that he was discriminated against by not being assigned the world championship since 2005 and denied him the opportunity to take over as a team referee.

Hernandez served as interim manager from 2011 to 2016, at the start of the pandemic’s abbreviated 2020 season and part of the 2021 season. However, he was not the head of permanent referees.

Referring to the 2011-16 seasons, the attorneys said in an appeals court memo that Major League Baseball “manipulated Mr. Hernandez’s year-end ratings, in order to show that his performance was worse than reality.”

“Mr. Hernandez’s assessments for the 2011-16 season do not even come close to summarizing his actual performance in those seasons.”

In an August 2020 report in response to a similar allegation, Major League Baseball said the allegations were “unfounded.”

The attorneys wrote that “the District Court has failed to follow current and applicable precedent in discrimination cases, where the pool of minority members eligible for promotion is too small to arrive at a statistically significant outcome for promotion. The effect is disproportionate.”

Kerwin Danley became the first black man to be appointed head of state in 2020. Mexican Alfonso Marquez was the first Hispanic born outside the United States to hold a similar position.

Florida-born Richie Garcia was the first Hispanic president between 1985 and 1989.