A Trevor Rogers reclamation project

Trevor Rogers (4.52 FIP) had a downright miserable 2024 season, and if you don’t believe me, feast your eyes on all of these blue circles. 

I’ve been thinking a bit about Rogers, because the market for starting pitchers this offseason has proven to be ludicrous: Nearly every contract has exceeded the model-based projection. For a team like the Orioles — grappling with the uncomfortable idea of life without Corbin Burnes — internal development becomes paramount. What can they salvage from Rogers, an undeniable flop at last year’s trade deadline, but also a 27-year-old southpaw with two more years of team control?

I began my exploration with what I knew about Rogers: Batters pummeled him last season. From there, as I searched for the root of his struggles, I followed my first hunch. If hitters are producing exceptional amounts of damage, looking at their swings would be a good place to start. 

To do this, I downloaded a Baseball Savant file containing data for all starting pitchers who threw at least 2,000 pitches last season; there were 103 such pitchers. From there, I ran the following SQL query: 

SELECT * FROM ‘mytable’ ORDER BY bat_speed 

The query aligned with my hypothesis: On average, Rogers allowed the fifth-fastest swings of all qualified SPs, at 72.2 mph. For context, Chris Sale (70.6 mph) induced the slowest swings, while Rogers came in comfortably worse than the league average (71.7 mph). 

Comfortable is the operating word, because it hits at the crux of Rogers’s problem in 2024. An intersection of attributes — diminished velocity, poor tunneling, routine shapes — made it easier for hitters to react to the pitch. From there, they produced faster swings, which are known to generate significantly more damage. 

I corroborated my findings with data from Alex Chamberlain’s ever-useful Pitch Leaderboard. Looking only at the fastest swings — taking the average of the top 10% of bat speed — Rogers stands out to an even greater degree. His fastest swings come in at an average of 81.5 mph, over two mph faster than the league average. On the flipside, he generates the fifth-lowest Poor Contact Rate, at just 57.3%. 

Hitters are exceedingly comfortable putting a good swing on whatever Rogers has to offer. To bounce back in 2025, Rogers must make it more difficult for them to properly identify the incoming pitch. With that in mind, here’s a nuanced look at what went wrong for Rogers, and how the Orioles may be able to unlock a quality arm for next season. 

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Orioles GM Mike Elias mentioned earlier this offseason that Rogers ran out of gas with the Orioles. While that seems plausible — Rogers threw 105.1 more innings in 2024 than he did in 2023 — his velocity was consistently down from the jump. 

Rogers FF, April 2024 — 92 mph

Rogers FF, 2021/2022 — 94.5 mph 

Rogers missed the majority of 2023 due to injuries to his left biceps and his right lat, and his velocity simply didn’t come back. He’s spent the early portion of the offseason working with Driveline to improve his lower body strength, which they believe will recoup some of that zip. According to MASN’s Steve Melewski, Rogers is hoping to keep his four-seamer in the 93-94 mph range. That would be a prudent number. 

Rogers FF, 2024	wOBA	xwOBA
93-94 mph	.316 wOBA	.359 xwOBA
92 mph	.586 wOBA	.527 xwOBA
91 mph	.627 wOBA	.546 xwOBA
90 mph	.401 wOBA	.579 xwOBA

Extending the scope of our data to Rogers’s entire career, we see that velocity is most certainly king. 

Rogers FF, Career	wOBA	xwOBA
95 mph	.295 wOBA	.295 xwOBA
93-94 mph	.395 wOBA	.392 xwOBA
91-92 mph	.448 wOBA	.402 xwOBA
90 mph	.401 wOBA	.579 xwOBA

Nothing here should be too surprising. However, velocity is exceptionally important for Rogers because of his four-seam shape — he has a prototypical dead zone fastball. Basically, hitters expect a fastball to behave a certain way out of a pitcher’s hand and, relative to his arm angle, Rogers’s fastball moves more or less like a hitter expects it to. We can see this relationship through the visualization below, courtesy of Max Bay’s Dynamic Dead Zone app.

Rogers's FF performed as expected in 2024

Velocity is one of the best ways to counteract the effects of a dead zone fastball. Once again, that makes sense: If a pitcher’s goal is to reduce the amount of time that a hitter has to make a swing decision, adding velocity certainly speeds up the process. 

But it’s not just about time. The pitcher also wants the hitter to know as little as possible about the incoming pitch at their decision-making point — if the hitter doesn’t know what pitch is coming, their swings are going to be poorer. And this is where tunneling comes into play. 

Tunneling is the art of making two different pitches look identical out of the hand, flying through the same ‘tunnel’ and thereby posing as the same pitch. Maxwell Resnick created a ‘Tunneling Boost’ metric to quantify the extent to which tunneling helps a specific pitch’s expected run value. Looking at the following table, we see that none of Rogers’ supplementary options pair well with his four-seamer. 

Pitch Type	Tunnel Boost
FF	-0.15
SI	-0.49
CH	-0.47
SL	-0.34

We can see what this looks like in practice through the following series of screengrabs. The first two images show a fastball-slider sequence; the second two highlight a fastball-changeup pairing.

The slider is released at a different horizontal point than the four-seamer

The changeup is released from a lower vertical point and a different horizontal point than the four-seamer.

Since his pitches don’t tunnel, Rogers is at a disadvantage: Hitters have an easier time differentiating one pitch from another, allowing them to make more well-founded swing decisions. It’s not surprising that some of his overall swing metrics — 12th percentile in Whiff%, 31st percentile in Chase Rate — are poor. 

Compared to his breakout season in 2021, Rogers’s offspeed pitches in particular are trending unanimously in the wrong direction. 

Slider	Swing%	O-Swing%	O-Contact%	SwSt%
2021	37.2%	24.5%	40.4%	14.9%
2024	34.2%	16.7%	47.7%	8.9%

Changeup	Swing%	O-Swing%	O-Contact%	SwSt%
2021	59.4%	46.1%	52.9%	19.4%
2024	56.7%	43.2%	67.6%	12.4%

With these constraints — diminished velocity, tunneling deficiencies — in mind, it looks to me like the Orioles did what they could with Rogers in limited time last season. For one, they increased his changeup usage against RHB, a prudent move because his changeup is his best pitch. And you should almost always try to throw your best pitch more often, especially when the alternatives aren’t passable. 

Baltimore also increased Rogers’s slider usage against LHB, another move that I like. His slider has a higher Tunneling Boost vs. LHB (-0.17) than RHB (-0.44). They used it as an early-count, in-zone option, which reminded me a bit of what Logan Gilbert used to do with his curveball — taking a pitch that doesn’t tunnel well and using it early in the count, hoping to catch hitters by surprise because it looks different. Trying to use that as an advantage is an interesting concept, especially with limited time to make overarching changes. 

Time is, of course, no longer a problem. What can the Orioles do this offseason to achieve a successful Rogers reclamation project? 

Let’s start with his current arsenal, which we know includes a four-seamer, sinker, slider, and changeup, the latter being his best pitch. With the exception of his slider, Rogers lives in one quadrant of the pitch plot. 

Driveline recently released Match+, a statistic that aims to quantify the interaction effects within a pitcher’s arsenal — essentially, how long pitches remain on the same trajectory prior to a hitter’s decision point. If a pitcher grades well on the Match+ leaderboard, then they are deft at making their pitches look alike. Rogers, to my surprise, ranks 16th among pitchers who threw at least 1,500 pitches last season. I expected Match+ and Tunnel Boost to be complimentary, but for Rogers, they are contradictory. 

Borrowing an idea from Michael Rosen of FanGraphs, I think that Rogers’s Match+ grade is a reflection of his intra-pitch diversity. Rosen looked at Tarik Skubal, who slots just beneath Rogers on the Match+ leaderboard, and noted Skubal’s ability to manipulate his shapes so that one pitch looks like another. Interestingly enough, Skubal’s pitch plot mirrors Rogers — especially since Skubal ditched his knuckle curve in the postseason. 

On Rogers’s pitch plot, there are two stable bridges: One between his changeup and his sinker, and the other between his sinker and his four-seam fastball. So, while his four-seamer may average 14.8 in. of IVB and 11.9 in. of armside movement, his pitches vary greatly on a pitch-by-pitch basis. The same is true for the other pitches in the bridge, the sinker and the changeup. I’m hesitant to label this a skill, but it can certainly be optimized into one. 

The way to do that would be by integrating a cutter and, sure enough, Rogers plans to integrate a cutter into his repertoire in 2025. Cutters are designed to bridge extreme movement gaps, which are amplified amid the popularization of sweepers. A study conducted by writers at Prospects Live revealed the ideal fastball-slider pairings for tunneling: 

• 6-14 inches of Horizontal Separation (18+ is unusable)

• 8-16 inches of IVB Separation

• 6-11 MPH Separation

On average, Rogers satisfies all of the criteria. But his intrapitch diversity accentuates the variance on any two consecutive pitches. A cutter would limit those concerns, because the four-seamer and slider no longer have to tunnel with one another — they can just tunnel with the cutter. 

I mentioned earlier that Rogers and Skubal have similar pitch plots. The similarities most certainly end there: Skubal touts elite velocity and wicked shapes, tunnels his pitches, and even weaponizes a herky-jerky windup to prioritize deception. But there is nonetheless a blueprint here for Rogers to follow as he shoots for a revival. Success in 2025 is predicated on an intersection of attributes, with velocity, tunneling, and shapes working together to limit a hitter's ability to put a good swing on a pitch.