What's Eating Taylor Rogers?

Rogers is an unusual pitcher, in terms of pitch mix. In an age in which most of the league is moving away from sinkers and toward four-seam fastballs, Rogers is a sinkerballer. More unusually still, he throws two distinct breaking balls, a slider and a curveball. As I wrote in May, he’s better-suited to doing so than most pitchers are, but it’s hard to maintain two breaking pitches without having them cannibalize one another.

This year, Rogers has spoken openly about being uncomfortable with and unable to throw his curveball. However, his slider has also been hittable, and batters are averaging almost 95 miles per hour in exit velocity against his sinker. In every possible way, Rogers is struggling to match the dominance he displayed from mid-2018 through the end of last season.

To see why this is happening, one can look back at that article from May. Many of the things that were true then remain true now. Rogers is a pitcher with tremendous stability and alignment in his delivery, but less-than-excellent timing in terms of getting to his ideal release point on every pitch. That makes his misses small, but it means that they tend to be up and to Rogers’s arm side, usually within the strike zone.

As was the case last year, Rogers isn’t walking anyone. The big elements of his delivery—the big muscles and the way they work together, in sequence—remain solid, so he’s around the plate as much as ever, and as much as any pitcher in baseball. The problems he’s encountered have to do, instead, with small things, but those can lead to big problems.

The most significant problem is that Rogers’s release point is down, especially on the breaking stuff.

He’s getting around both the slider and the curveball a bit. The somewhat humped-up position he usually reaches with his shoulder at release, getting his fingers on top of the ball to create the spin he wants, hasn’t quite been there this season. The issues are mostly about hand position, and the differences are so small they can be tough to spot even on video, but they lead to an inability to get the ball down consistently and hit the spots he wants to hit, especially outside the strike zone.

Rogers’s slider, especially, is not supposed to finish in the strike zone. The sinker is most effective when kept close to the bottom of it, and the curveball has to be able to tumble out of the zone on occasion, in addition to sometimes falling in for a strike after appearing to be high. (With the lower release, the curve also isn’t as deceptive in that regard; it never looks like it’s going to be as high as Rogers wants it to look.)

A little bit of hand position seems like a relatively easy thing to correct, but it might not be so. Let’s loop back to the pitch mix, and to the fact that he throws both the curve and the slider, in defiance of convention. As I wrote in May, throwing the two pitches requires different arm actions and a different mindset, even though he slightly simplifies the difference by throwing them both with the same grip.

Here’s one more layer: when it comes to the arm action, the sinker requires something different than either pitch. At release, the sinker requires the inner forearm to be facing the plate almost perfectly, or to very slightly point toward the on-deck circle on the first base side. The curve requires the forearm to be highly supinated, with the inner portion of it facing toward Rogers’s body (or the third-base dugout). The slider, which is what Rogers is leaning on right now as the curve remains troublesome, requires the forearm angle to be about halfway between those of the other two offerings at release.

When juggling those three motions, it’s not easy to fix even a slight problem with a release point. Rogers is supinating too much on the breaking balls, and modulating that can be tricky, especially when one has tinkered with muscle memory by creating multiple motions to accommodate multiple breaking pitches.

It’s far from impossible for Rogers to regain his form. He’s likely to do so, because the foundations of his delivery are solid and he has shown the feel to manipulate all three of his key pitches in the past. For now, however, his struggles are real. Despite the fact that he can still strike batters out at a high rate and hardly ever issues a walk, he will continue to give up hard contact until he can make the small mechanical adjustments necessary to get his stuff down in and below the zone more consistently.

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