Record-Setting LPGA Star, Bad Umpire Are Sports Hero, Zero This Week

by Julian Spivey

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Hero

​Nelly Korda is on one of the greatest hot streaks in the history of women’s golf and yet it wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t know this given the lack of press from the mainstream sports media. Korda has won five consecutive LPGA Tour tournaments, including last weekend’s Chevron Championship major championship. The 25-year-old’s five straight wins tied an LPGA Tour record shared by Nancy Lopez (1978) and Annika Sorenstam (2005). Korda has 18 wins on the LPGA Tour but had gone more than a year between victories when the first of her five-in-a-row streak began in late January. Her biggest accomplishments in her career include winning the 2021 Women’s PGA Championship and the gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Games (held in 2021 due to Covid-19). Korda has not indicated yet when she’ll attempt to go for the solo record of six in a row. 

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Zero

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There’s no shortage of horrible baseball umpiring moments every Major League Baseball season and though the 2024 season is still less than a month old there’s already been some doozies. But what happened in the first inning of the New York Yankees/Oakland A’s game on Monday (April 22) was among the dumbest umpiring decisions I’ve ever seen. Yankees manager Aaron Boone was ejected just five pitches into the game by home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt who mistook a fan in the front row seats yelling at him for someone in the Yankees dugout. After Boone pointed out that a fan was the one making the remarks to Wendelstedt, the umpire could be heard on television mics saying, “I don’t care who said it. You’re gone.” To make matters worse, after the game and Wendelstedt had a chance to review the ejection he doubled down and refused to apologize for doing so saying: “Apparently what he said was there was a fan right above the dugout. This isn’t my first ejection. In the entirety of my career, I have never ejected a player or a manager for something a fan has said. I understand that’s going to be part of the story or something like that because that’s what Aaron was portraying. I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area, but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.”
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It's pretty crappy umpiring to throw out a manager knowing he didn’t say anything, which Wendelstedt at least copped to in his statement. The New York Post on Thursday published that Wendelstedt would face “subtle discipline” for his ejection of Boone but Major League Baseball honestly should suspend Wendelstedt for such a flagrant example of bad umpiring. The league should take a much harsher stance with its umpires but seems too afraid of the umpire’s union to hold the bad umps to the fire. That’s why bad umpiring like Wendelstedt showed on Monday will continue to happen.