Re-Revisiting the Trevor — TREVOR, not Taylor — Rogers Trade

Some people run away from their bad opinions. Not me. When I’m wrong I build a monument to my own foolishness and dance around it like a child around a maypole. So I think what I’m going to do from now on is just write about Trevor Rogers every few months from now until the end of his career.

I was all-in on Rogers when he came up with the Marlins. The combination of easy lefty velocity and starter volume is the forbidden fruit of scouting, and nobody is immune to its temptations. Think about how James Paxton kept getting eight-figure contract offers five years after he stopped being an effective major league starter. Or how it took about eight starts last year for Garrett Crochet to go from “maybe a reliever” to “definitely prime Chris Sale, no questions asked.” Rogers was no different.

Remember Big League Advantage, the company that started buying a stake in young athletes’ future earnings in exchange for a small cash payout before they made it big? I find the concept morally abominable in a vacuum, but more than that, I don’t want to live in a world where we can literally buy stock in athlete’s futures. Because if we could, I would’ve lost my shirt in the Great Trevor Rogers Panic of 2022-23.

The Orioles, facing down a long playoff run with a rotation of “Corbin Burnes, uh, pray for four days’ worth of rain…” didn’t go after Crochet at the deadline. Instead, they tried to fix Rogers, who’d been healthy but not especially effective in 21 starts for the Marlins. Rogers’ tenure in Baltimore proper lasted less than three weeks, after which he spent the remainder of the season pitching for Triple-A Norfolk.

For a major league veteran like Rogers, Triple-A is where you go to find yourself, to figure stuff out. It certainly wasn’t to beat up on minor league competition; Rogers posted a 5.65 ERA in five starts for the Tides, though he struck out more than a batter an inning and cut his walk rate by a third compared to his MLB numbers.

The Orioles were probably never going to cut Rogers loose after two months, given that they’d just parted with Kyle Stowers and Connor Norby to acquire him. (“Probably,” because they did let Eloy Jiménez go after picking him up at the deadline.) This is a team that just let Burnes walk, and whose brand-new owner is out there stumping for a salary cap; the Orioles don’t just give out million-dollar contracts without a reason. So if they’re paying Rogers $2.6 million in 2025, they must see something.

So what’s he been working on? We have Statcast data for Triple-A now, so let’s see if anything changed after Rogers’ demotion.

You have to want it to see it, but there’s a slight change in his release point. Rogers has always had a low-three-quarters delivery, but his release point has been sagging gradually since 2021. Not by much — maybe a couple inches in any one direction — but it’s moving in all three planes: down, out, and toward home plate. A 26-degree arm angle in 2021 drooped down to 21 degrees during his time with the Orioles.

With Norfolk, Rogers had an average vertical release height of 5.88 feet, which would’ve been the highest of his major league career. In his last start, on September 19, that release point was all the way up to 5.94 feet. This comes at the cost of a couple inches of extension, but Rogers didn’t need that in 2021.

What’s it doing to his repertoire? Well, there’s some change, but not much. Here’s an expansion of a table I published back in August: Rogers’ repertoire pre- and post-trade in 2024, compared to what he was throwing in his 2021 Rookie of the Year campaign, plus his stint in the minors at the end of 2024.

There are two things I like from this table and one thing I really don’t.

Here are the two good things: Rogers dumped velocity from both his slider and his changeup. When he was striking out almost 30% of opponents as a rookie, Rogers changed speeds well. There was a 10-mph difference between his four-seamer and his changeup, and a 13-mph one between his four-seamer and his slider. During his Orioles tenure, when his fastball backed up and his secondaries sped up, those numbers shrank to six and nine mph, respectively.

The slider has never had exceptional movement, but in Norfolk, Rogers was throwing it in the high 70s, and in addition to an additional inch of IVB, the lower velocity added yet another inch of drop due to gravity. Rogers’ best secondary pitch in 2021 was his changeup; by the time 2024 rolled around he’d added more than 300 extra rpm to a pitch that usually works better with less spin. Maybe this is noise, but Rogers’ changeup did spin less in Norfolk than in the major leagues. That’s promising.

But the bad news outweighs all of this: Rogers’ two fastballs both averaged high-80s velocity, or five mph less than what he threw his rookie year.

In 2021, Rogers’ only fastball was a dominant four-seamer, which he threw 57.9% of the time. Among starters, it was a top-10 four-seamer. The following year, it was one of the 15 worst four-seamers among starters. Opponents hit .218 off Rogers’ heater in 2021 and .312 in 2022, despite no perceptible drop in velocity and only a small one in movement.

This explains why in the world Rogers would ever want to throw a sinker, which he’s been doing for two seasons now. And the results are pretty bad. Major league opponents wOBA’d .374 off Rogers’ sinker in 2024; minor leaguers wOBA’d .386. I know wOBA is new enough that not everyone has an intuitive understanding of how many wOBAs are too many, like we do with batting average or OBP. So let me give you some context: In 2024, two qualified major league hitters posted wOBAs between .374 and .386: Bryce Harper and Gunnar Henderson.

In a perfect would, a pitcher would not want to throw a fastball that turns an average hitter into Harper and/or Henderson.

Rogers’ sinker and four-seamer have similar velocities, and Rogers’ sinker actually gets wicked arm-side movement — the second most of any pitcher who threw at least 500 sinkers in 2025. Rogers is only one of nine pitchers in that group to throw a sinker with both 16 inches of arm-side run and seven inches of vertical rise. Taylor Rogers was one of those other eight, which is a fun, if moderately confusing, coincidence. (Adding to the confusion is Taylor Rogers — not to be confused with his twin brother Tyler Rogers, who pitches for the Giants — was traded yesterday from the Giants to the Reds. Later today we will have a reaction to that trade, meaning we’ll have two different headlines on the site mentioning a T. Rogers trade. We at FanGraphs like to keep you on your toes.)

Another one of those pitchers is Cristopher Sánchez, who like Trevor Rogers is also a low-three-quarters lefty. The opponent wOBA on Sánchez’s sinker — his only fastball worth mentioning — is .385, which is even worse than Rogers’. But Sánchez also gets much more movement on his secondary pitches than Rogers, making both his slider and his changeup devastatingly effective. And his walk rate was a little more than half of Rogers’ in 2024. Which is why Sánchez was an All-Star and got a contract extension and Rogers got traded and demoted.

If there’s a path back for Rogers, it’s probably as a pitcher who looks something like Sánchez. But all of this is academic unless he can start throwing in the mid-90s again, and even then there’s a huge difference between a no. 2 starter and a well-compensated International Leaguer. I guess I’ll check back in six months to see how all that is going.