CB Bucknor Is Retiring: MLB’s Most Roasted Umpire Accepts Buyout as Baseball Cleans House
CB Bucknor is done. Major League Baseball’s most reliably terrible umpire has accepted a buyout offer from the league and will retire at the end of the 2026 season, according to Bob Nightengale of USA Today. Nobody is going to miss him.
Bucknor is one of seven umpires who accepted a package this cycle. Laz Diaz, Brian O’Nora, Lance Barksdale, Marvin Hudson, Tony Randazzo, and Andy Fletcher are also stepping away before the 2027 season begins. That is a significant chunk of the veteran umpire pool leaving at once, and MLB is clearly using this window to reset the crew rooms.
Bucknor is the headline name because of how bad his season has been on camera. Twice already this year he has landed in the highlight reels for the wrong reasons. The first was a hilariously bad run of Automated Ball-Strike challenges that kept being overturned against him. The second was a call so laughably wrong that players on both teams were smiling at each other about it during the game.
He has been umpiring at the MLB level since 1996, which makes him one of the longest tenured umps in the league. Longevity in that job is usually a badge of honor. In Bucknor’s case, it turned into a running joke, one that got louder as the ABS system started exposing exactly how often he was missing pitches that veteran fans always suspected he was missing.
Here is what is fair to say. Bucknor has not actually worked this season. He took a foul ball to the mask in early April, and the concussion protocol has kept him on the sidelines for roughly three months. He was already essentially retired in practice before he made it official.
The buyouts are also part of MLB’s broader transition to a partial ABS challenge system in the majors. Umpires who might have skated by for another few years suddenly find themselves being graded in public every single pitch. That kind of accountability will eventually run any weak umpire out of the profession. Bucknor and his cohort of retirees are just the first wave.
Diaz will draw his own retrospectives. He has been in the league since 1999 and generated his share of controversial moments. But no umpire in this group has been mocked online with the volume and consistency of Bucknor. Meme accounts have built entire brands around his blown calls.
Bucknor deserves credit for showing up to work for three decades in a job where you get yelled at every single day. That is a hard way to make a living. But the sport is better off with more accurate calls, faster games, and a new generation of umpires who grew up with the technology that grades them.
Bucknor’s exit is the end of an era, just probably not the era he would have wanted to be remembered for. Baseball is quietly modernizing itself, and this is what quiet modernization looks like on paper. Seven veteran umps out. Younger blood coming in. And the memes finally have to find a new target.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
