Reds Trade for Taylor — TAYLOR, Not Tyler or Trevor — Rogers

Break up the twins! The Giants did just that on Wednesday, sending lefty Taylor Rogers and cash to the Reds in exchange for minor league righty Braxton Roxby. The move ends the two-year run that paired Rogers with his twin brother Tyler in San Francisco, and fortifies the back end of Cincinnati’s bullpen.

If you don’t have your scorecard handy, this Rogers brother is the lefty who throws from a three-quarters arm slot, with an average release angle of 29 degrees according to Statcast. The one still on the Giants is the righty submariner with an average arm angle of -64 degrees. Trevor Rogers is no relation, and the timing of this morning’s piece by Michael Baumann is just an eerie coincidence.

Taylor Rogers, who turned 34 on December 17 — Tyler did too, to be clear — is coming off a season in which he posted a career-low 2.40 ERA in 60 innings spread across 64 appearances. It was his third year in a row and the sixth time in his nine-year career that he’s reached the 60-game plateau. For as impressive as his ERA was, it was somewhat out of step with his 3.75 FIP and 3.29 xERA. While he lowered his walk rate from an unsightly 11.6% in 2023 to 8.8%, his strikeout rate fell from 29.6% to 25.7%, making his 16.9% K-BB% his worst mark since 2017. This was the third year in a row that Rogers’ strikeout rate has declined, from a high of 35.5% while he was with the Twins (but not with his twin) in 2021. The velocity of his sinker has been on the wane as well, dropping annually from a high of 95.7 mph in 2021 to 93.0 last year.

Rogers’ declining strikeout rate was offset by his dramatic improvement in suppressing hard contact. Where he was significantly below average in both 2022 and ’23, he was among the best in ’24:

So what changed? The big thing is that Rogers threw his sinker more often than his sweeper for the first time since 2020; his share of sinkers rose from 41.3% to 52.8%, and his share of those in the strike zone rose from 40.7% to 54.2%. That increase in sinker usage was sort of a hopping-on-the-bandwagon thing for Rogers, as the Giants threw more sinkers than any other club for the second straight year; their 26.4% rate led the majors, though it was actually down from their 28.1% rate in 2023, the highest of any team since the pandemic-shortened season. Rogers’ sinker was much more effective against righties than it had been in recent years, and while it would be a misnomer to suggest they tattooed his sweeper, both righties and lefties got much better results against it on contact than expected:

Overall, righties hit just .202/.268/.380 (.282 wOBA) against Rogers, while lefties slashed .284/.364/.421 (.343 wOBA). This was the first time Rogers showed a reverse platoon split since 2019, a handy outcome considering 57% of the batters he faced were righties, but it’s not necessarily a split that we should expect to continue. Over the past three years, Rogers has held lefties to a .253 wOBA, compared to .339 for righties.

Rogers joins lefties Sam Moll and Brent Suter in the Cincinnati bullpen. While Rogers has experience closing — he saved 79 games from 2019–22 with the Twins, Padres, and Brewers — he figures to share setup duties with righty Emilio Pagán in front of closer Alexis Díaz. Though he did trim his walk rate late in the season, Díaz was rather erratic last year, pitching to a 3.99 ERA and 4.57 FIP even while converting 28 of 32 save chances, so it’s definitely not a bad thing that Rogers gives new manager Terry Francona a ninth-inning alternative in case Díaz struggles.

The Giants will pay $6 million of the $12 million Rogers will make in the third year of his three-year, $33 million deal, so this is something of a bargain for the Reds. That $6 million bought the Giants the righty Roxby, who turns 26 in March. After going undrafted out of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Roxby connected with the Reds during a Zoom meeting with the Kyle Boddy, then the team’s director of pitching, and assistant pitching coach Eric Jagers. “[T]hey had video breaking down my mechanics, as well as the analytics of my pitches and how I can use them better,” Roxby told David Laurila in 2021. “That made it hard not to choose them.”

The 6-foot-3, 215-pound Roxby posted a 5.21 ERA but a 28.8% strikeout rate in 48 1/3 innings at Double-A Chattanooga in 2024, his first full season in the upper minors. Eric Longenhagen graded his slider as a plus with his fastball and cutter both above average, though his command is just 30-grade. From Roxby’s prospect report:

Roxby’s fastball was up two ticks in 2024 and now lives in the mid-90s with uphill angle and tail. Roxby’s funky lower slot creates these characteristics. He tends to pitch backwards off of his sweeping mid-80s slider, which he commands better than his fastball. He has the stuff of a pretty standard middle reliever, though Roxby’s command puts him in more of an up/down bucket.

On the subject of the trade, Tyler Rogers shared this very sweet note:

In all, it’s hard to characterize this trade as an impact move for either team, but it is one of several additions the Reds have made this month — most notably the additions of Gavin Lux and Austin Hays — while trying to upgrade from last year’s 77-85 record. Who knows, maybe they’ll trade for Tyler (or Trevor) next?