It's only April, but there's already a leader in the clubhouse for the 2024 Ump Show Award. And between you and me, I don't think anyone's going to beat this one.

There is no better way to describe Hunter Wendelstedt's ejection of Aaron Boone on Monday than as buffoonery of the highest order.

It had everything to do with Wendelstedt and a heckler sitting above the New York Yankees dugout and, as Boone pleaded in highly NSFW language, absolutely nothing to do with him:

I don't know what's more embarrassing for Wendelstedt. His initial nonsensical, Dril-tweet-esque "I don't care who said it! You're gone!" or his eventual doubling down on the righteousness of tossing the Yankees manager after the game. It may be a tie, honestly.

Whatever the case, this is what the Ump Show is all about. At nobody's urging, an umpire suddenly goes from background character to the lead at center stage, all by going off-script in ways that are varying degrees of baffling, infuriating and totally outrageous.

You hate to see it. Unless, of course, you love to see it.

But for how much longer will the Ump Show be a fact of life in Major League Baseball? Could 2024 be the year when the performances start to become endangered? Are we all in attendance for the swan song?

Umpires Are Having a Bad Year

When I've waded into umpiring controversies in the past, it's typically involved pointing out they're actually very good at their jobs and people need to cut them some slack.

But so far, 2024 is testing even my resolve to defend these guys.

There are only so many ways to quantify the quality of the work umpires do, but the means we have include success rate in manager challenges and how many balls and strikes they're calling correctly.

So, here are two key figures: 53.3 and 7.5.

The first is the rate at which managers are winning challenges this year, which is significant because A) that means umpires are losing most challenges and B) it's the highest success rate managers have had since the replay system went into effect in 2014.

The second figure is the rate at which umpires are making bad calls from behind the plate, either by calling pitches in the strike zone balls or pitches outside the zone strikes. That's up from 2023, and the rate of balls in the zone is notably the highest it's been since 2018.

Wendelstedt is one of the main offenders. Per Umpire Scorecards, his dimwittery vis-à-vis Boone was merely the opening act of a rough day behind the plate:

To be sure, this year's bad umpiring isn't all on Wendelstedt. There's another, arguably more powerful and more ominous force at work.

Ángel Hernández Has Returned

The 2023 season was one of relative accuracy for umpires. They prevailed in manager challenges 51.5 percent of the time and, at 7.1 percent, had their lowest-ever rate of erroneous ball and strike calls.

I'm not saying this was because Ángel Hernández was sidelined for much of the year with a back injury, but I'm not not saying that either.

Hernández needed only 10 games' worth of home-plate duty last season to end up as the lowest-rated umpire of the year. And so far in 2024, it's clear he hasn't lost his edge.

Did you see what he did to poor Wyatt Langford? Suffice it to say that if MLB Rookie Abuse was a felony, this footage would be enough to put the 62-year-old away for life:

Avert your eyes and ears, Kyle Schwarbers of the world, but this is but one of several new entries into Hernández's catalogue of greatest hits. On his watch, there have been not one but two inexplicable timeouts, as well both a missed balk and a phantom balk. And then there was that time he suplexed the Phillie Phanatic.

Only one of those is made up. I say again: only one.

Thus does the legend of Hernández's villainy continue to grow, yet the good and certainly oft-asked question of why he still has a job unfortunately has a simple answer: His fate is not up to MLB, but rather the Major League Baseball Umpires Association. And according to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, Hernández's fellow union members like him.

It's oh-so-frustrating that it's oh-that-simple, but could hope be on the horizon?

Will the ABS Save MLB from Bad Umpires?

If there is, it exists in a scenario in which robot umps come to the majors and make not just bad umpiring obsolete but maybe bad umpires as well.

Or, basically what ESPN's Jeff Passan mused about on The Rich Eisen Show on April 15:

The automated ball-strike system, or ABS, is currently in use in the minor leagues, but it's going to come to MLB sooner or later. Maybe sooner rather than later, as Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported last May that the league could consider it for 2025.

In Passan's words, the ABS will be a means to "hold umpires accountable publicly" and also for MLB to keep receipts. In theory, it's "the sort of thing I think that if you had the evidence of how many different times someone has screwed up, it would be a lot easier, presumably, to oust that person from the spot."

The ABS would, after all, take bad calls from out of the abstract territory of mistakes that should not have happened into realer territory of mistakes that can be reversed on the spot.

A challenge system, a la the one in use at Triple-A and which was also used in Spring Breakout, could be an especially powerful accountability tool. Like with the replay review system, umpires would still have their own agency for the most part. But their judgment could also be scrutinized and, when appropriate, overruled.

The effect, in essence, would be that it would be easier for any given umpire's authority to be undermined. And the more an umpire were to have their authority undermined, the fairer it would be for MLB to make the case that they're not worthy of any authority.

Long Live the Ump Show

There are bound to be unintended consequences whenever the ABS comes to MLB. And for umpires, one thing it could do is further diminish the theatricality of the work.

Arguably the best strikeout call ever was lost when Tom Hallion retired in 2022. It's a struggle to name active umpires with great strikeout calls, which makes one wonder if such things are going the way of the dodo and (Joey Wiemer notwithstanding) weird batting stances.

"You were taught to sell your call, you were taught to be emphatic," former umpire Joe West told Sam Blum of The Athletic in August 2023. "Why would you jump up and down and try to sell it if it's going to get overturned? Calling balls and strikes is probably the most difficult thing to do in all of sports [officiating]."

No amount of robot umpiring, however, is going to eradicate the need for actual human umps to be on the field as general facilitators. And as long as that's the case, the Ump Show will likely never cross that line from endangered to extinct.

And I, for one, sure hope that doesn't happen.

It's easy to be in favor of using technology to reduce the likelihood of an umpire causing actual, tangible ruination, but that's merely one genre of the Ump Show. Some are harmless and, let's face it, very entertaining.

Wendelstedt's ejection of Boone qualifies. To paraphrase an infamous take, one felt bad for the Yankees, but it was great content. The purest of boobery, as if gifted from the baseball gods themselves. The highlight is an inner-circle Ejection Hall of Famer, where Boone now rubs shoulders with Earl Weaver, Lloyd McClendon and Phillip Wellman.

And nothing, not even the ABS, could have stopped it from happening. If that's not a comforting thought, nothing is.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.