When the Orioles acquired Trevor Rogers last year from the Miami Marlins by trading away Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers, many Orioles fans (myself included) were a bit skeptical.
Sure, Norby and Stowers were sort of “extra” prospects that didn’t have an everyday spot to play in on the Major League team, Rogers wasn’t exactly someone it seemed like would help the team reach the World Series (which, you know, ostensibly the team wants to do).
Sure, Rogers was a pretty incredible pitcher in 2021 when he posted a 2.64 ERA over 25 starts but since then, he’d been unable to recapture that magic, putting up not mediocre seasons but pretty objectively bad ones.
And last year really seemed to solidify those concerns. Over 25 starts last year, Rogers posted a 4.92 ERA with a 1.58 WHIP, 17.3% strikeout rate, and 10% walk rate. Only four of those starts were with the Orioles before he was bounced down to the minors. By the end of the year, and even more so at the start of this year when Rogers landed on the IL while Kyle Stowers started lighting things up at the plate, this seemed like a failure of a trade.
Cut to now and Rogers has quietly turned in a pretty incredible season so far (or maybe not so quietly as Orioles fans are well aware of what he’s been doing). On the season so far, Rogers owns a 1.44 ERA with a 0.83 WHIP, 22.8% strikeout rate, and 6.3% walk rate. Even the analytics suggest there’s some legitimacy to this, as he also has a 2.54 xERA and a 2.56 FIP.
So what changed?
Taking a dive into the data, there seems to be two main things that are contributing to Rogers’ success so far—tweaking his repertoire and improved control.
The latter is pretty quick and easy to see. As I mentioned earlier, his walk rate is sitting at 6.3% so far this year which is a career-best and significantly better than the 10% walk rate he posted last year.
And you can see it with his repertoire—he’s locating his fastball in the strike zone 64.8% of the time, good for the 99th percentile among fastballs in the league and again, a career-best (last year, his zone rate on his fastball was 49.6%).
Same with the changeup, which is sporting a 45.8% zone rate, good for 90th percentile in the league among changeups and an improvement over his 34.1% zone rate from last year.
So now the repertoire. There are a couple of key differences here, chief among them is Rogers’ improved fastball velocity. Last year, Rogers’ fastball was sitting around 91.8 MPH on average. This year, it’s sitting at 93.2. Now, that’s not the 94.6 it averaged back in 2021 and 2022, but an improvement is an improvement.
The fastball itself is a perfectly fine pitch. It’s nothing incredible but comes in with average extension and velocity and works just fine. It’s the rest of his repertoire that’s working really well alongside it.
Rogers has a fairly distinct approach to righties compared to lefties. He mainly works with his fastball (which he locates up in the zone) and changeup when facing right-handed hitters. The changeup works beautifully, located almost exclusively low in the zone (as it should be) and inducing a good number of chases (a 36.3% chase rate, which is solid) and loads of weak contact with a 68.6% groundball rate.
Against lefties, Rogers doesn’t utilize the changeup much at all but instead goes for more of a fastball/sinker approach alongside his slider and his new sweeper.
This isn’t working as well, and it’s probably the main area of concern for Rogers. His fastball is fine and against righties it, combined with his changeup, is working great. But the slider isn’t working as the putaway pitch to lefties that it should be, nor is the sweeper.
Like I said, if there’s any area of concern for Rogers, it’s his mediocre breaking pitches, but as long as he keeps his fastballs floating around 94 MPH up high and keeps consistently locating his changeup down low to righties, I think he can generally overcome his mediocre breaking pitches when facing lefties.
It’s been an incredible thing to watch so far this year, and I’m really hopeful that Rogers can keep this up. I obviously don’t think he’s suddenly a Cy Young, sub-2.00 ERA type of guy, but I don’t think there’s any reason he can’t keep up some version of the success he’s had so far this year going forward.
Ben Palmer has lived in Maryland his whole life and currently spends his days working as a health care journalist. He also previously wrote for and was a site expert for the FanSided blog The Baltimore Wire and currently works as managing editor at Pitcher List where he writes about fantasy baseball.