Gabriel Rincones Jr.‘s road with professional baseball has taken him from Florida, to Venezuela, to Scotland, back to Florida, to Reading, PA and now to Arizona.
His Venezuelan father was a pitcher in the Florida Marlins farm system when his son was born in Boynton Beach, Fla. The family returned to Venezuela, but a few years later, the elder Rincones became a safety engineer in Scotland, overseeing rigs pumping oil out of the bed of the North Sea. Schools there had no baseball programs.
“My friends would make fun of me (when I was talking about it); they were like, ‘Isn’t that the sport we see in movies?’ ” he said. So, as a nine-year old, he played in his father’s adult baseball league, facing much older American expatriate players.
He later played in the Scotland Baseball League, an eight-team organization. Rincones, Jr. also played for Scotland’s national baseball team.
“It wasn’t like taking live at-bats from anyone. It was more like getting up early Sunday morning, drive an hour, play some catch. It was every now and then, because my dad works offshore, so he’d be home for four weeks and offshore for four weeks,” Rincones said. “I’d have my uniform already laid out on my bed so I could get into it as soon as I got up.”
“It wasn’t really organized baseball like it is now,” said Rincones. “The sport’s grown a little bit ever since I was growing up there.
According to baseballscotland.co.uk, there are several levels of baseball there, the highest being AAA, with eight teams.
The Phillies selected Rincones Jr. in the third round of the 2022 draft, and for the second consecutive winter, sent him to play in the Arizona Fall League. Through 12 games with the Glendale Desert Dogs, he was hitting .225 with two home runs, seven RBIs and two stolen bases. In the 2023 AFL season, Rincones batted .293 with two home runs, 17 RBIs and 15 stolen bases playing for the Scottsdale Scorpions.
In an injury-shortened 2024 season with the Phillies Double-A affiliate, the Eastern League’s Reading Phillies, he batted .263 with 11 home runs and 29 RBIs.
“I can do better than this,” he says of his 2024 season, in which he played the corner outfield spots.
Getting to Reading started when he was in seventh grade in Scotland. His parents knew he meant it when he told them, “I want to be a baseball player,” so he went to live with an aunt in Venezuela to see if he could handle being away from his parents and siblings.
He returned to Scotland, but when he was ready for high school, he went to live with other relatives, an aunt and uncle in Hillsborough County, Fla. He enrolled in H.B. Plant High School in Tampa, which has sent 90 players to the major leagues.
What was that experience like?
“It was crazy. First of all, I didn’t speak like this,” he said in unaccented English. “It was a decision I made, am I going to hide my original accent that I learned to speak English in just so people can understand what I’m saying, so they don’t ask me questions like, ‘What did you say? Can you say that again?’” he said.
“It was my second culture shock. When I went to Scotland I had to learn English. That was easier, I was a young kid, you don’t even realize you’re doing it,” he said.
Rincones said he wondered if he’d ever seen his friends in Scotland again, and worried about his future in the game.
“[I was] thinking… ‘how am I going to get better at baseball?’ I’m not really up to par with the peers that are ahead of me. I’m at this high school with Kyle Tucker, Pete Alonzo, Michael Givens, all these big leaguers. The first two years of high school I was upset, I wasn’t very good at baseball.”
He tried out for the baseball team as a sophomore at Plant, but was cut. After that, he would spend hours a batting cage and didn’t stop hitting balls “until my hands bled.”
But one of his biggest assets, said John McCormick, his head baseball coach at Florida Atlantic University, is “he has an unwavering belief in himself, unwavering. Not arrogant, because when I say not arrogant he’s willing to change, he’s willing to be coached, he’s willing to make adjustments, but he just knows he’s gonna be good.”
“He gave me an answer once that I never heard before. Most of the kids (say), ‘I wanna get drafted, I wanna play pro ball.’ So we were talking one day and I said, what do you wanna do? He says, ‘I wanna be in the Hall of Fame.’ I kind of laughed. He says, ‘No coach, I wanna be known as one of the best guys that ever played this game, and I think I can do it,’” said McCormick. “He said this not in an arrogant way that you go, ‘Man. I believe this guy.’”
McCormick added, “He’s one of the hardest workers I’ve ever been around. And when I say that, I mean, everything, not just hitting, running sprints, defense, rehab, anything that needed to be done to make him better, he put his full effort into, and then he’s a great leader and a great teammate. People gravitate towards him.”
At the end of his senior year at Plant, Rincones batted .280. He received one scholarship offer, from St. Petersburg College in St.Petersburg, Fla.
“I went to junior college and looked at myself in the mirror and (thought), ‘I’m better than .280,’” Rincones said, and for the next two shortened seasons (because of covid) he hit .400.
“I’ve always had a very big chip on my shoulder, like what are the scouts saying, what do they think I can’t do, and that stuff gets under my skin all the time,” he said. “I had a 30-grade speed put on me. I don’t know who it is that put it on me; it’s still there and I’m stealing 30 bags a year. I wouldn’t have gone this far into stealing bases if I was given my speed grade as what it is, but I thank that guy for giving me a 30-grade speed just because now I’m locked into that part of my game.”
He was selected in the 19th round by the San Diego Padres in the 2021 draft, but didn’t sign, instead enrolling at FAU, where he batted .346, hit 19 home runs and 69 RBIs, along with an OBP of .451. The Phillies made him their third round choice in the 2022 draft.
“When we took him in the draft he was a guy that made me feel very good about him,” said Preston Mattingly, the Phillies assistant general manager for player development. “He pulled the ball very well. (He is) a good bat manager and had a lot of skills to be valued. We also felt (there were) things that we can improve. And we thought he was a very instinctual player.”
Al Pedrique, who managed Rincones at Reading this past season, said, “This is a kid who pays attention to details, where the defense (is playing). He does a lot of homework, studying starters and relievers from the opposing team. He’s always prepared, loves to play the game, loves to win and compete. This kid has a lot of tools, he can run for a big guy, he’s a good baserunner, he will steal a lot of bases.”
He added Rincones has “great power, he has power to all fields. He’s working on being more selective, staying away from pitches down in the zone. He can put up some big numbers and I’m sure he’ll be playing in the major leagues pretty soon.”
Rincones went more than three years without seeing his parents. They saw him play in high school and when he was with the Phillies Class-A affiliate in Clearwater, Fla., but they would ask him, “Do you want us to fly out there? [We could] be on the flight next week if you wanted.”
“They they made a lot of sacrifices so I can have the opportunity to even get better. I can only imagine how difficult and how much doubt and worry there would be for your kid,” Rincones said. “First of all, you have to sacrifice everything financially or emotionally, time-wise. And it’s not guaranteed that the kid is going to play college, let alone get drafted.”
“Props to them for even taking the courage, but they asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and I would always answer ‘a baseball player.'”
