Tyler Rogers makes me completely satisfied that I’m a baseball analyst. Not in the identical approach that Shohei Ohtani does, after all. Not in the identical approach that Tarik Skubal does, or Bobby Witt Jr., or every other variety of superstars. These guys are nice as a result of they do the clearly good baseball issues, like operating quick and throwing laborious and hitting balls far. Rogers appears like an accountant who was hurriedly inserted into the sport as a final resort. He additionally simply threw 77 1/3 innings with a 1.98 ERA final season. His profession ERA is 2.76 over eight seasons. I don’t learn about you, however one thing about that tickles me endlessly.
Rogers’ superpower is his command. Final 12 months, he walked solely seven batters, a 2.3% price. However that command will be laborious to pin down. For example, check out the 26 pitches Rogers threw in three-ball counts:
As you may see from the overlaid PitchingBot command grades, these areas are nothing particular. There are too many crushable cookies, too many non-competitive pitches, and never sufficient motion on the fringes of the strike zone. It’s a 42 command grade all in, nothing to put in writing dwelling about. In actual fact, Rogers walked extra batters than league common per three-ball pitches thrown (in a tiny pattern, to be clear). When batters bought thus far within the rely in opposition to him, that they had a good probability of reaching first without spending a dime. How, then, did he submit the second-lowest stroll price within the majors?
To know that, we’ll must rewind the rely. Walks require three issues: a three-ball rely, a pitch exterior the strike zone, and no swing from the batter. Rogers cuts issues off with merchandise primary. Take a look at how he began batters final 12 months:
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First, marvel on the chart. The proliferation of pitches across the low arm-side nook is spectacular. The misses have a tendency extra in than out, simply what you need as a sinker-dominant pitcher early within the rely. Most significantly, check out that Waste Miss Proportion mark.
That’s a statistic that I invented for the FanGraphs Lab, which makes me a biased consumer, however I’m type of obsessive about it. A 22% waste miss price implies that 22% of the pitches Rogers threw in 0-0 counts had been: a) graded beneath common for location, b) graded beneath common total, c) exterior the strike zone. In different phrases, these are pitches that normally get taken for balls and don’t overly bother the batter. A drop shadow makes it even clearer:
What’s much less clear from the info is that 22% is an enviably low mark. It’s laborious to throw strikes! The league-average waste miss proportion, which you’ll see in that graphic, hovers round 33% in 0-0 counts. Loads of pitchers you assume are nice waste roughly that many pitches. Paul Skenes has a 40% waste miss price on first pitches. Yoshinobu Yamamoto checks in at 35%. Zack Wheeler was above 40% in his final wholesome season. Skubal hovers round 30%.
That implies that plenty of matchups in opposition to Rogers begin with a aggressive pitch, relative to even superb pitchers. He reached a 1-0 rely 27% of the time in 2025; the league common was 38.1%. That’s an unlimited hole. And it solely bought larger, as a result of he didn’t waste many bullets on the second pitch both:
The mannequin likes these areas lower than the 0-0 ones due to rely leverage. That blue chunk within the heart represents 0-1 pitches proper down the center, and PitchingBot fairly fairly docks Rogers for these. However the important thing factor right here is the waste miss price remains to be down round 20% — much better than common. The strike throwing provides up. Rogers fell behind 2-0 within the rely about half as regularly because the league as an entire. Fewer wasted pitches means fewer simple takes for hitters, fewer occasions the place announcers stated, “Nicely, he’ll must battle again into this rely” after two broad ones.
Now we get to the attention-grabbing half. Rogers hasn’t all the time been this fashion. The PitchingBot Visualizer graphs get crowded if you throw 4 years of knowledge into them, however right here’s the place he positioned the opening pitch of every plate look from 2020 via 2023:
That’s not removed from regular. (As a facet notice, you may see that the league is attacking the zone extra; league-wide Waste Miss% is decrease now than it was again then.) However then Rogers got here again in 2024 and began pounding the zone, dropping to a 24% waste miss price. How? He stopped utilizing his slider. He threw a roughly even mixture of sinkers and sliders to start out counts for the primary six years of his profession. His command of the slider is nothing particular. Even in 2025, he wasted 40% of the first-pitch sliders he threw. The distinction is that he threw solely 52 sliders in 0-0 counts final season, as in comparison with 141 in 2023, every in about the identical quantity of taking part in time. In different phrases, his slider wasn’t placing him in good conditions, so he simply stopped utilizing it.
That doesn’t sound like an unbelievable plan. The person throws solely two pitches, and his fastball sits 82-83 mph. He’s just about begging hitters to swing now. He doesn’t waste pitches. You’re going to get one thing within the zone early. It’s going to be a sinker thrown at batting apply velocity. This sounds exploitable.
Or not less than, it sounds exploitable till you see folks swing at a Rogers sinker. It’s not a lot that they swing and miss. The issue comes after they make contact. Most sinkers are simply optical illusions – they rise lower than most fastballs, so batters swing above their flight path. Rogers throws the other way up, which implies that his sinker truly has downward motion. It has double the downward motion of the next-closest sinker, in truth. Batters managed fly balls on solely 9.8% of their contact in opposition to the pitch.
Slug is within the air, which implies that Rogers pours chilly water on the best way offenses function immediately. Possibly you’ve heard that pitchers don’t exert a lot management on high quality of contact. That’s true within the combination – and a grimy lie in terms of Rogers. Previously 5 years, 65 pitchers have allowed 400 or extra batted balls with their sinker. Rogers’ .299 wOBACON allowed is the fourth lowest in baseball over that point interval, behind José Soriano, Wheeler, and Sandy Alcantara. His .304 xwOBA allowed is second, behind solely Wheeler. Pitchers throughout the league permit a wOBA of round .350 on sinkers. They permit a slugging proportion of roughly .500. Rogers is categorically totally different; he’s allowed a .387 SLG (on a .384 xSLG) over the identical span.
One other approach to consider it’s that Rogers is attempting to perform totally different targets than most pitchers. For many guys, the purpose of the sport is to get to 2 strikes after which make the batter miss. Rogers can’t actually try this! His putaway proportion – the speed at which he turns two-strike pitches into strikeouts – was within the twenty eighth percentile league-wide. That’s no fluke; his profession common is nearly exactly the identical. It is smart. What’s he going to do once they get to 2 strikes, buzz a fastball by them?
The actual breakthrough got here when Rogers leaned into his distinctive sport. If getting to 2 strikes isn’t all that good, and permitting a ball in play isn’t all that dangerous, a lot of the standard knowledge about pitching goes proper out the door. Why do pitchers throw their secondary choices early within the rely? Why do they nibble across the edges? It’s as a result of they need to get to 2 strikes with out permitting a ball in play. But when balls in play aren’t a difficulty, two-strike counts aren’t that useful, and walks are anathema – free baserunners are harmful if you don’t strike anybody out – then throwing an early-count slider is unnecessary in anyway.
It should be very tempting to comply with orthodoxy. Pitching works a technique for nearly everybody, and Rogers used to principally comply with that blueprint. He blended his two pitches as a lot as potential to confuse the opposition. However all that stood between Rogers and greatness was doing the other of that. He’s all the time commanded his sinker nicely. He flooded the zone with it practically as effectively in 2023 as he did in ‘25. He simply hadn’t but had the epiphany that for him, a wasted ball was the worst potential end result.
There’s one thing attention-grabbing about walks hidden in these information. Like I stated above, Rogers hasn’t modified his precise command all that a lot. Nobody’s good. Everybody wastes pitches. Walks are probabilistic; get behind within the rely as a pitcher, and there’s some probability you’ll simply miss a couple of occasions and quit a free go. It’s simpler to manage how usually you get to three-ball counts – and one of the simplest ways to do this is by minimizing non-competitive pitches earlier in plate appearances. That comes down partially to command and partially to intent. Lately, Rogers has dialed each in. That’s the way you slash your stroll price by practically two-thirds with out essentially altering your sport.
Ought to different pitchers be following Rogers’ lead? In all probability not. They don’t throw the other way up. They don’t have an outlier capability to manage contact high quality. They’ll attain again for a using four-seamer or reality-bending breaking ball; that’s why they’re within the majors. However Rogers is within the majors as a result of folks can’t put his sinker within the air. Now that he’s pitching to maximise that expertise, it’s a sight to behold.