It wouldn’t quite be fair to be surprised. Abner Uribe pitched a lot this season, and relievers who pitch a lot from April through September tend to tire in October—especially if they’ve never worked that much before. Uribe made 75 appearances over the initial 162 games, including 69 that lasted at least three outs. Now, he’s paying the price for that, and so are the Brewers.
Over four outings in the postseason, Uribe has faced 21 batters. He’s only allowed three hits, but he’s also walked four, and he has just four strikeouts. That’s not a huge surprise, because his velocity is dramatically down—a trend that started not this month, but in September.
If Uribe’s not throwing at full speed, he’s not going to miss bats at his usual rate, or even keep the ball on the ground as well as he usually does. He gutted his way gorgeously through the final two innings of Game 5 of the NLDS, but even then, the Cubs made some hard contact against him and even lifted the ball a bit. They just hit the ball right at Brewers fielders. Uribe hasn’t been so lucky thus far in the NLCS.
For many fans (already wary of the skipper’s tendency to ride his hurlers hard), the temptation is to blame Pat Murphy for Uribe’s fade, but the manager did his best to manage the exposure and workload of his relief ace during the second half. Before the All-Star break, as the Brewers recovered from a rough start and chased down the Cubs in the NL Central, Uribe pitched a ton. He made 40 appearances by the end of June. In the first half, overall, he made 13 appearances on zero days’ rest and another 17 on one day of rest. After the break, though, Murphy turned to him on zero days of rest just seven times, and on one day just 13 times. Even amid the month-long hot streak coming out of the break, Murphy was fairly judicious with his best relief arm.
Once the Crew essentially sewed up their third straight division title and gained the inside track on a bye in the first round of the playoffs, Murphy backed off as much as circumstances allowed. Uribe had a full week off in the first half of September and two appearances on three days’ rest in the second half of the month, between which Murphy tried to keep Uribe in a rhythm that would feel more familiar in the postseason.
Unfortunately, the swirl of other injuries and constraints involved prevented Murphy from doing any more to limit Uribe’s workload. Trade deadline acquisition Shelby Miller blew out his elbow. Fellow righties Nick Mears and Trevor Megill each had stints on the injured list. There just weren’t enough healthy pitchers to work around Uribe all the times that Murphy might have liked to, especially over the final two months.
Murphy certainly bears some limited culpability in the fact that Megill got hurt, as he, too, was heavily used at times. There were games in which Uribe, Megill, Aaron Ashby and/or Jared Koenig appeared when they just didn’t need to, and that’s caught up to Milwaukee at the worst possible time. On the other hand, the team won so relentlessly over a two-month period that a major accumulation of work for the high-leverage relief arms was unavoidable—and, after all, winning games is the point of this endeavor. Winning all those games is how the Brewers earned their week of rest and the home-field advantage that helped them past the Cubs.
In hindsight, the front office probably should have acquired a more reliable supplemental reliever at the trade deadline. By targeting Miller, they landed a useful arm for virtually no prospect cost, taking on dead money from the Diamondbacks instead. There’s a reason why Miller was available on those terms, though. One more strong, fresh arm would have made quite a difference for the team last round, and could still be conferring benefits here in the NLCS.
Matt Arnold and company have to strike a wise balance. It was a calculated risk not to add more to the pen in July, and it made sense to take a measured stance. They’ve been burned a bit. Brandon Woodruff’s injury shifted more strain to the bullpen, by forcing pitchers who might otherwise have been shortened up to work in bulk roles down the stretch and into October. Megill’s limited availability this month is flying below the radar, but it’s been an important constraint. The fact that he and Miller missed the guts of September and that Mears petered out in the second half left Uribe overexposed, and all of that has made it impossible for the Brewers to keep pace with the extraordinary pitching of the Dodgers over the first two games of the NLCS.
The series isn’t over. The Brewers just need a somewhat unexpected hero to emerge on the pitching staff during the balance of this set—and, of course, for the offense to wake up from its slumber during the off day in Los Angeles. It’s unlucky, though, that they find their pitching staff so thin at the most critical juncture of the season, after it was arguably the deepest corps in the league during the regular campaign.
