I know this isn’t really a blind item, what with the name of the article and the picture at the top and all, but bear with me for a moment. I’m going to give you some details about a mystery player. Here’s a list of all the transactions they’ve been involved in since their initial signing in 2016:
This feels like a pretty boring player, right? Some kind of replacement level journeyman, probably a reliever given how teams shuffle them on and off the end of the roster. It’s true: He’s a reliever, and a replacement level one at that, just like you’d expect. This particular player pitched to a 5.80 ERA and 4.44 FIP (4.94 xFIP, 4.35 SIERA, etc.) in 40 1/3 innings of work. His WAR was exactly zero across parts of three major league seasons.
Oh, here’s another data point. Our mystery man started the 2024 season in Triple-A, and things didn’t go so well. He struck out 29.7% of the opposing batters he faced, but walked 10.1% of them and gave up a ghastly eight homers in 34 innings of work. That’s, uh, not great. That’s how you end up with a 5.77 ERA. It’s also apparently how you end up as the reliever with the second-best ERA and best FIP in all of baseball, and earn a job as the closer for the Tampa Bay Rays.
That’s right – Edwin Uceta has been one of the best pitchers in the game this year, albeit in a small sample of 30 1/3 innings. He’s absolutely embarrassing people out there, drawing bad swings at a comically high rate and striking out more than a third of the batters he faces. He’s not walking anyone or giving up homers. He’s made 20 appearances and given up runs in exactly one of them – two runs in a two-inning stint on July 30. Other than that, he’s been perfect.
I could keep this article short and sweet if I wanted. “The Rays acquired a reliever and then talked to him, and now he is one of the best pitchers on the planet.” We get it, this is what they do. But that feels a little bit lacking here. There has to be more to it. There has to be something we can point to.
A quick recap of Uceta’s prospect profile coming into the year might help. He came up as a kitchen-sink starter, mixing sinkers, curveballs, and changeups. His changeup was probably his best pitch – PitchingBot certainly thought so, and it also got the best results out of the bunch. He kills the spin on it very effectively, so it starts on a plane with his sinker and then just vanishes.
The problem with Uceta’s pitch mix was two-fold. First, his sinker wasn’t anything special. It was a show-me pitch more than anything else, a fastball he threw because you have to throw some minimum number of fastballs. Second, his curveball was more pretty than effective. It’s one of those gorgeous low-80s rainbows that looks better than it is because our eyes love the giant arc but don’t perceive the lack of velocity. It didn’t pair particularly well with the rest of his offerings, either. Major league hitters are outrageously good these days; you can’t just throw them so-so pitches and get away with it.
The Rays had a few solutions. The first one was simple: Ditch the curveball. He’s thrown only three this year, and as befits a Tampa Bay reliever, he’s instead throwing a sweeper that has similar depth but much more glove-side movement. To be honest with you, I’m not wild about that pitch either, but he’s using it sparingly, as a surprise to show righties every once in a while.
The second solution is one I’m surprised no one landed on before: Add a cutter. When I cook, I have a secret: If something doesn’t taste right, I just hit it with a little acid. Since I’m a decent cook and also really annoyingly obsessed with baseball, I say I’m “sprinkling in a cutter” when I do it. Like acid in food, cutters seem like a magic ingredient. They bridge movement profiles and fix platoon deficiencies. If you don’t know what a taco needs, it’s probably lime. If you don’t know what a pitcher needs, it’s probably a cutter.
This 2-D representation doesn’t quite do justice to what’s changed, but here’s a graph of his pitch movement from 2022:
And from 2024:
His curveball was just too different from his other pitches, too easy to identify. It fell 30 inches more than his sinker on its path home, and he liked to locate that sinker low in the zone. You can do the math: A curveball on plane with the sinker was generally a bouncer, and when he wanted to throw it for a strike, it had to pop high out of his hand on a relative basis. It’s hard to blend two pitches when they’re so different.
The cutter lives in that middle zone that drives hitters crazy. It’s not like you can cover the cutter and the changeup with a single swing, any more so than you could the curve and change. Sure, the cutter and changeup are much closer in velocity, but if Uceta aimed the two at the same spot, the cutter would end up something like 10 inches higher and a foot farther to his glove side. The same is true of the sinker/cutter combo; we’re talking eight vertical inches and a similar amount of horizontal gap.
Oh yeah, there’s something I should tell you about Uceta’s sinker. It’s not really a sinker, even though that’s the nomenclature we use to describe it. Here’s one way to think about it: He throws it about 94 mph on average. A sample cohort of 94 mph sinkerballers: Bryan Hoeing, Reese Olson, Framber Valdez, and even Chris Sale. But Uceta’s sinker doesn’t look like those four. It falls six inches less than any of theirs, and with far less arm-side run. It’s closer to being a four-seamer than a sinker in terms of movement profile — more induced vertical break than horizontal movement.
Another way of putting it: 339 pitchers have thrown 50 or more sinkers this year. Only 13 induce more upward vertical movement than Uceta. Two of those are Aroldis Chapman and Josh Hader, which should give you an idea of what big-vertical sinkerballers look like. There’s also Bailey Falter and Roansy Contreras, so it’s not like flamethrowers have a monopoly on this style of pitch, but it’s a weird one for sure. If you compare his sinker to four-seamers with similar velocity, it looks a lot like Joe Ryan’s or Jake Irvin’s.
That brings me to the next change Uceta has made in Tampa Bay: He’s redesigned his delivery somewhat to take advantage of how his fastball works. He’s always been a low arm-slot guy. Here he is in 2023:
And here’s a sinker from 2024:
The camera angles aren’t ideal, but he’s definitely throwing from a lower slot now. His average release point has fallen from an average of 5’0” to 4’7.5”. That arm slot doesn’t jive with the pitch movement; guys who throw from that low generally throw pitches that move horizontally. It’s like a toned-down version of Hader’s weirdo fastball; righties see the arm motion and instinctively think it’s tailing toward them, but instead a lot of the movement is fighting gravity.
By dropping his release point, he’s also creating a phenomenally flat approach angle. He throws the ball low and hard, and it rides. The result is a pitch that hits the strike zone at a very shallow vertical approach angle, which is exactly what you want. Pitch models are drooling about this new pitch. PitchingBot gives his sinker a 59 on the 20-80 scale, up from 52 in his pre-2024 career. Stuff+ thinks it went from 100 to 131. Yeah, that’ll do. Armed with this new, four-seamer-y fastball, he’s working higher in the zone, which means hitters have more to cover when they’re trying to identify a pitch out of his hand.
The truth is, some of these changes were already in the hopper last year. His release point was dropping, his fastball was getting flatter upon strike zone entry, and he’d pretty much ditched the curveball. But the new cutter has been a revelation, and his fastball has been downright overpowering in its present configuration.
It was no given that Uceta would suddenly turn into a great pitcher when he went to Tampa Bay. It’s hardly written in stone even now; some of his biggest past struggles have been with command, and relievers lose their grasp of the strike zone all the time. It’s not hard to imagine a world where Uceta struggles to replicate his success over a bigger sample, or after a winter off.
That’s not really the point of this article, though. The point is that a guy whose previous major league experience was mostly a montage of packed suitcases and new locker rooms is now one of the best relievers in baseball. It’s not some mirage. It’s not some fluke of small samples and batted ball luck. He’s just this good, at least at this very moment. What can you do other than marvel?
