Abner Uribe was feeling himself on Tuesday night.
His manager was none too pleased.
But the Brewers right-hander said he did it to defend his teammates.
The late-inning reliever whipped out a version of the “suck it” crotch chop — made famous in the 1990s by the D-Generation X faction in WWF — after striking out Cardinals first baseman Alec Burleson to end the top of the eighth in a 6-0 Milwaukee win.
After the game, Uribe alleged that Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol signaled in the prior game to hit certain Brewers players.
Uribe got the first two outs of the inning before yielding a four-pitch walk to Iván Herrera and a single to Jordan Walker.
After the count went full to Burleson, Uribe got him looking with a low slider, which led to the three pumps chop celebration. Burleson challenged the call, and luckily for the Brewers reliever, the call was upheld.
Milwaukee skipper Pat Murphy didn’t mince words after the game — he didn’t like what he saw. At all.
“That’s unacceptable. Just unacceptable,” Murphy told reporters in his postgame press conference. “I don’t know what got over him, he’s been an emotional guy, but that kind of thing, that’s just not how we do things. I was embarrassed by it. Why are we doing it in a 6-0 game? What are we doing? There must be something deeper that I don’t know about.”
Murphy said that he does like Uribe but that he just won’t tolerate that type of celebration on the field. He said he talked to Uribe and speculated MLB could punish him in some shape or form.
Uribe said through an interpreter after the game that he owed an apology to his teammates and coaching staff after the game and that he understood the chop was “unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, he said Marmol apparently gestured on Monday that he wanted to hit Brewers players, so he wanted to have his Milwaukee teammates’ backs. He said there was an event before the game that also led to him expressing himself through the celebration, but he did not elaborate on what the event was.
“I don’t think it’s very professional for them to be making gestures like that,” Uribe said through the interpreter. “And I don’t think it’s right for any of my guys to be going out there with any sort of fear in their heads that we may be getting thrown at or they can’t play the game the way they want to be able to play.”
Herrera, who was on second during the celebration, called the chop “disrespectful” but hoped the Cardinals “take care of it and we move on,” according to the Belleville News-Democrat.
The teams play again on Wednesday afternoon, and this should add some extra intrigue.
