Giants not worried by Rogers’ numbers
It’s better to be lucky than good? What’s the matter with being both? Tyler Rogers would love to know.
The San Francisco Giants relief pitcher is a hard-luck story. He’s down on his luck. If not for bad luck, he’d have no luck at all. Yeah, all those cliched lines apply here.
One more: The Giants expect Rogers’ luck to change.
Unlike a whole lot of other sports, baseball involves a high degree of luck. A batter can smoke four screaming line drives directly into defenders’ gloves while another batter can punch four bloopers that safely fall in the outfield grass. Rogers knows all that. “That’s what makes baseball unique,” he said, “and that’s why we all love it.”
Rogers wouldn’t mind if things would start evening out for him. His ERA of 5.22 is easily the highest in the Giants’ bullpen, which suggests he’s having a bad year.
Indeed, 17 earned runs on 35 hits and eight walks in 291⁄3 innings is not the Rogers of 2021.
Here’s another way to look at it: Rogers still generates a lot of weak contact. It’s still rare for a batter to barrel up on the submarine pitcher’s unorthodox repertoire of offerings. The fact is, many of those soft-hit balls have found holes, far more than a year ago.
We know this because Rogers’ expected ERA (or xERA) is 2.97. The stat accounts for the amount of contact and quality of contact, and it shows Rogers still is fooling batters, keeping them off balance and limiting their hard-hit rates as he did in 2021 when his ERA was 2.22 over a league-leading 80 appearances.
The Giants’ coaching staff has made all this clear to Rogers, who appreciates the input but realizes his job is getting outs and preventing the opponent from scoring, and he’s not doing it as well this year.
“Normally, I don’t pay attention to those numbers, but those numbers have come to light, so I’m aware of them,” Rogers said. “Maybe they make me feel a little better. At the same time, the expected numbers aren’t the real numbers. So you’ve still got to put up the real numbers.”
For Rogers, expected numbers are tougher to analyze compared with many of his bullpen colleagues who throw fastballs approaching 100 mph, or topping it in Camilo Doval’s case.
Batters train for these heaters, but Rogers doesn’t conform. His pitches are wacky. And from wacky pitches comes wacky contact. So in a wacky sort of way, all those bloopers and bleeders should be expected. It’s just a matter of whether the defenders are positioned properly and can make a play and whether the Giants’ shifts are working on Rogers’ watch.
Tuesday, Rogers pitched the eighth, following Logan Webb’s seven scoreless innings, and watched Royals lefty batter Nicky Lopez swing late and hit a 77.9 mph grounder down the third-base line for a leadoff single. Andrew Benintendi grounded to short, but Brandon Crawford was shading up the middle. Infield hit. Both runners scored in the inning, for Kansas City’s only runs in a 4-2 Giants victory.
Wednesday, Rogers threw a 10-pitch seventh inning, resembling his 2001 self. A couple of groundouts and a foul out.
Rogers isn’t the lone Giants pitcher with a large gap between his ERA and xERA. It’s even wider for starter Alex Cobb, who’s on the injured list and has a 2.07 xERA but 5.73 ERA.
Manager Gabe Kapler and his staff pay attention to their pitchers’ expected numbers because they can help explain results and help enhance preparation.
“Baseball players are emotional, inherently,” Kapler said. “They look up at the scoreboard and see their batting average, their counting stats, their ERAs, and anything we can do to keep them from getting too caught up in that, whether that’s a tool like expected average, expected OPS, hard-hit rate, walk rate, strikeout rate, all of these stats that tend to lead to good surface-level stats over long periods of time, we’ll shift the focus away from the stats that are on the scoreboard and use them as a tool for us to have a conversation.”
And with Rogers?
“For Tyler, it’s all a mind-set — ‘I deliver a sinker or slider in the location I wanted and got the weak contact on the ground.’ That’s the win,” Kapler said. “The win is not us converting it into an out. The win is not avoiding an earned run. It’s the process of every pitch. So the frustration of a ball going through the hole again doesn’t start to creep in.”
That’s all fine and dandy, but a hit’s still a hit. Hard hit or softly hit. The feeling among the Giants is that over time, the difference between the ERA and xERA will narrow, if only because things tend to balance out over a full season. That’s the hope, anyway.
Rogers’ velocity with his fastball and slider are up a tick over last year, and he’s throwing more strikes and first-pitch strikes. Batters are making softer contact on average this season (82.9 mph exit velocity, down from 85.4 mph), though their line-drive rate is better (20.6% versus 16.4%). On the other hand, nobody has hit a ball far enough off Rogers to clear the fences. His homer rate is 0.00.
For the most part, he’s where he wants to be with his repertoire. Now it’s a matter of walking off the mound with more scoreless innings.
“My perspective is, it’s going to even out over the course of time,” Kapler said. “We’re going to be rewarded for our confidence in him, and he is going to benefit from the confidence that his teammates and his coaches have shown him.”
Meantime, Rogers is waiting for his luck to change. The Giants believe he’s due.
“What kind of weight does expected ERA carry?” asked Rogers. “At the end of the day, nothing.”