Abner Uribe, or Else

One of baseball’s delightful postseason traditions is the introduction of new characters to the national consciousness. During the regular season, the focus is spread out over as many as 15 mostly meaningless games a night. When the calendar turns to October, there is one game going on at a time, maybe two, and each pitch is of colossal importance. Following regular-season baseball is fishing with a net; following postseason baseball is fishing with a sniper rifle.

So every October, we meet players previously unknown or little-considered. We put faces to names and visual recognition to stat lines. And like clockwork, some rookie middle reliever from a non-glamor franchise (usually but not always the Rays) will come out in the eighth inning of a game against the Astros or Dodgers and cut through three straight All-Stars like a hot wire through Styrofoam.

If you care about spoiling key postseason narratives, you should stop reading. If not, you’ll want to learn about Abner Uribe.

Uribe making any kind of lasting impact on the postseason is predicated on the Brewers not only hanging on to their playoff spot but also staying in the playoffs a while. Assuming they get there, it will be their fifth trip to the playoffs in six seasons. Over that time, they have played 17 postseason games, nine of them coming in the daytime.

Not to be all East Coast Bias guy, but since 2018, 14 different teams have played six or more playoff games. Five of those teams have played at least half of those games in the daytime: four teams from the Midwest, including the Brewers, and the A’s. The Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers have all had nighttime starts for at least 80% of their playoff games in the past five seasons. Here, have some tin foil. There’s plenty to go around.

The point is, if Uribe is going to get on national prime time TV, the Brewers are going to have to make a run. And in order for that to happen, Devin Williams needs to be closing games. Uribe has mostly been a seventh-inning guy for Craig Counsell so far. So this is a middle reliever for a team whose playoff games are probably going to get buried on the TV schedule. And yet I’m picking him as a potential breakout star of this postseason. That should tell you what you need to know about Uribe’s stuff.

I don’t know if Uribe’s rise should be described as meteoric or not, but either way there’s not a long track record. Uribe was a 20-year-old just out of rookie ball when the pandemic shut down the minor leagues in 2020, and he missed most of 2022 with a torn meniscus. The only reason I was aware of him before this season was a conversation I had with Eric Longenhagen during last year’s playoffs. Eric had just seen Uribe pitch in the Arizona Fall League, and he told me to watch out for him in that same distant, sagacious tone of voice you usually hear from an oracle delivering an ambiguous prophecy at the start of a Greek epic.

When Uribe got called up to Milwaukee two months ago, he’d thrown just 59 2/3 career innings above rookie ball. But in those 59 2/3 innings, he struck out 97 batters. The headline on his scouting report is “100-mph sinker.” Behold:

Abner Uribe's Sick 101mph Turbo Sinker.

"That's gonna be on PitchingNinja." ? pic.twitter.com/H08aUN5BU4

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 12, 2023

Uribe’s sinker averages 99.4 mph this season, which is the third-hardest two-seamer in baseball behind Aroldis Chapman and Jordan Hicks — you know, two of the guys who are famous for being the hardest-throwing pitchers of all time. Uribe has thrown 17 pitches at 101 mph or harder this season. That’s 4.9% of his total pitches thrown, the seventh-highest ratio in baseball.

If you’re like me, you hear the phrase “100-mph sinker” and your mind jumps immediately to Jhoan Duran, but these two are not very much alike. Duran is a three-pitch pitcher, with a four-seamer, a curveball, and that splinker of his — a pitch that walks right up to the god of physics, spits in his eye, and asks, “what the hell are you gonna do about it?” Uribe is a two-pitch guy, with a hard slider that turns left as it approaches the plate and the aforementioned even harder sinker that turns the opposite direction. Statcast credits Uribe with throwing a four-seamer as well, but only 5.5% of the time, or 19 times total in his major league career.

Since there is nothing new under the sun, Uribe can’t be unique. Unusual, sure, but there must be others like him. And sure enough, there are four pitchers this year who have average sinker velocity of 98 mph or higher and who throw that sinker and one breaking ball at least 80% of the time put together. Why 80%? I wanted to set the bar high enough to eliminate pitchers like Duran or Joe Kelly who have broader arsenals, but not so high that I cut out Hicks and Gregory Soto. They’re my endpoints; I’ll set them as arbitrarily as I like, thank you.

I considered adding José Alvarado, whose sinker-cutter combination has a similar effect to a hard slider like Santos or Uribe, but that was a bit too much of a stretch. The Phillies, it’s worth mentioning, love a hard sinker. Three of the 14 hardest-thrown sinkers in baseball this season belong to Phillies relievers: Soto, Alvarado, and Seranthony Domínguez, and no. 17, Yunior Marte, is a Lehigh Valley Iron Pig.

It’s probably fair to assume that Uribe is far from his finished form, not just because of his lack of professional experience but also because he’s still only 23 years old. The biggest thing he has to improve is his command. Eric’s entry on Uribe in December’s Brewers top prospect list has the phase “20-grade control” in the second sentence, which is not what you want to see, even if Uribe has clearly developed a closer relationship with the strike zone this season. Still, he’s been tagged in one article during his two-month big league career: a bit in a Ben Clemens Five Things column that involves Uribe entering a game with the bases loaded and walking in two runs on eight pitches.

Still, occasional wildness isn’t the end of the world. I once bemoaned the fact that relievers had gotten so reliable; a bullpen can be so good it sucks all the fun out of the game. I was writing about Alvarado and publicly tried to walk the sentiment back repeatedly over the course of that season, but I can’t deny that life is more exciting when a reliever with unhittable stuff loses his command.

As hard as Uribe throws, his delivery isn’t some ungovernable mess of spider crab limbs. The best version of himself probably involves working that four-seamer in a little more to keep hitters off-balance, as Hicks does. The main difference between the two on the results front is that Hicks gives up far less hard contact.

But right now, Uribe can just throw the ball past anyone. He has thrown 109 sliders this season. Hitters have swung and missed 28 times and put the ball in play just four times. Of those batted balls, three had an xBA under .100, and two had an xBA under .010.

On one hand, Uribe could only have existed now, with modern coaching and development techniques and the kind of athletic standards that allow a man to throw a sinker at 100 mph consistently. On the other, he’s an old-school rock-and-roll, all-gas-no-brakes reliever. Right now, he’s a hipster favorite. But if he gets any kind of exposure in the playoffs, everyone is going to know his name.