"He got tired of the social media firestorm" - Jeff Passan believes fans played a role in Angel Hernandez retirement

Angel Hernandez retired after a career that spanned more than three decades in MLB. He was one of the most controversial umpires out there. There were presumably more than a few reasons he decided to hang it up mid-season, but one MLB insider believes the internet had a hand.

Social media would erupt every time Hernandez made a mistake. The posts would go viral and receive much attention, compounding Hernandez's error. That was a more recent development, and Jeff Passan thinks it might've been the final straw.

Passan said, via Barstool Sports:

"A lot of that stuff, frankly, led to him going away. He got tired of it. He got tired of the social media firestorm that exists."

The reporter continued:

"Frankly, I will acknowledge this is understandable because there are parts of his job where he was genuinely bad. And it was magnified by the ubiquity of baseball on social media now. And how every time he would do something wrong, it would get put out there."

There was hardly ever anything positive about Hernandez on the internet. It was almost exclusively negative, and that continued in a cycle until Hernandez stepped down from his role. Passan called it an echo chamber that "wound up being part of his undoing.”

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Aaron Boone defends Angel Hernandez

In the wake of Angel Hernandez's retirement, New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who has had his fair share of conflict with quite a few umpires, came to his defense. Via Bleacher Report, he called him the poster child for bad umpiring and added that it was an unfair moniker.

Angel Hernandez got a lot of hate on social media

Umpire Auditor, a viral social media page that tracks umpire statistics run by Dylan Yep, added that things with Hernandez got out of hand:

"When he does make a mistake, everyone is immediately tweeting about it. Everybody is tagging me. If I'm not tweeting something about it, there are a dozen other baseball accounts that will."

It's unclear how active Hernandez was on social media, but if he was, he undoubtedly saw the rampant disdain for him from baseball fans on a nightly basis.