How Giants’ reliable Tyler Rogers came from nowhere to anchor bullpen.
Tyler Rogers: Submariner persevered, now thriving
The Giants’ MVP award this season will be up for grabs. The sage Marty Lurie suggests it should be a group award. Why single out one man when the Giants are an endless tag-team of success stories?
But if you’re looking for the player who best personifies the (lack of ) pedigree and the mystery of these Garage Sale All-Stars, you might want to consider relief pitcher Tyler Rogers.
Like so many of his co-MVP teammates, Rogers just seemed to appear in the Giants’ club-
house one day. Two seasons later, much of Rogers’ mystery remains. How does the pitcher with the slowest fastball in the big leagues — an 83-mph meanderball, delivered with an extreme submarine motion — keep getting people out?
Being a 2021 Giant means having to prove yourself over and over. Prove that you’re not a fluke, that you’re legit despite your roundabout path to the big leagues. That’s Rogers. At every level, he had to prove that his weird delivery works. With the Giants, he had to prove he could be an everyday reliever, and now he’s having to prove he can be a closer for a team steaming toward the playoffs.
Going into Tuesday’s game, Rogers was tied with Cleveland’s Bryan Shaw for the MLB lead in appearances with 73. Hitters are barreling his pitches at a 1.8% rate, in the league’s top 1%, according to Statcast. In his past 29 appearances, covering 29 innings, Rogers walked one and struck out 24.
We don’t know how Rogers does what he does, but at least we know where he comes from: obscurity. When he was a high school junior, his twin brother Taylor was a Colorado all-state pitcher, and Tyler played on the JV team.
Undrafted out of high school, Tyler went to Kansas to study to become a firefighter, and do a little pitching on the side. He soon rose to stardom. As a sophomore, Rogers was named second-team All-Jayhawk Community College Conference. I asked him if he still has the certificate.
“I don’t think I ever got one,” Rogers said. “If I got one, I would have kept it, for sure.”
After two seasons pitching at Austin Peay, Rogers was drafted by the Giants in the 10th round in 2013, No. 312 overall. He recalls that his $7,500 signing bonus was exactly $136 below slot. He splurged on a set of golf clubs.
“Looking back on it, probably not the best purchase,” Rogers said, “because I didn’t have any money to go golfing with the golf clubs.”
It was all a lark. Rogers planned to play two or three years in the minors, then move into the family business, following the footsteps of four generations of Colorado firefighters.
As a pitcher, all Rogers had going for him was his novelty delivery. He began to drop his
arm slot back at Gardner City Community College, a veritable submarine factory under coach Chris Finnegan. Rogers’ delivery continued to evolve in the minors, his long right wing dipping lower and lower as he rose higher in the minors.
In 2016, Tyler hit Double-A at age 25, just as Taylor was breaking into the big leagues with the Twins. Later that year, Tyler reached Triple-A Sacramento, and got stuck. Three seasons with the River Cats.
He kept his fire-science textbooks close at hand.
“The end of my baseball career did creep into my mind,” Rogers said.
One thing that kept Rogers pitching was the endless encouragement from his brother. Taylor kept reminding Tyler that if the Giants weren’t interested, there were 29 other teams that might want to check
out a right-hander who consistently got batters out in Triple-A.
Maybe Rogers bumped into
a glass ceiling of disbelief — not his own, but that of the Giants’ decision-makers. Maybe they struggled to envision big-league success for a pitcher rocking high-school velo.
“I just needed to show a larger sample size in the minors than most guys, just to prove (the unconventional style) could work,” Rogers said.
In 2019 Rogers was a lateAugust call-up at age 28. He went 2-0, with 16 strikeouts in 172⁄3 innings. Last season he was tied for third in MLB appearances with 29.
Rogers considers pitching every day his duty as a member of the imaginary Sub Club, the brotherhood of submarine pitchers, past and present. He said that leading MLB in appearances “is something very cool to me, and something that I take pride in, with the sidearm-submarine community.
“If you look back in the day, (Kent) Tekulve and (Dan) Quisenberry and (Chad) Bradford, they appeared in a lot of games. And we take that to heart, being able to pitch in a lot of games.”
Rogers says he pays attention to fellow active submariners Eric Yardley (Brewers), Tim Hill (Padres) and Adam Cimber (Blue Jays).
Because his mechanics are so unconventional, Rogers has learned to coach himself, physically and mentally.
“That’s a kind of silver lining, you learn yourself a lot more when you can’t necessarily get the quick help (from coaches) externally,” Rogers said. “You really do figure it out yourself. You kind of learn your delivery, and yourself.
“For me, mostly, (evaluating his own performance) is about your mind-set, where your thoughts were that day, making sure they’re positive and not negative. That’s really the biggest evaluation of myself, is to make sure you’re thinking positive out there, thinking the right things, making sure the game’s not speeding up on you.
“A lot of times, when you look back at an outing, you’ll go, ‘The game really sped up on me.’ I’ve got to make sure to take more deep breaths, or calm down, or take an extra half-second to collect yourself.” A kind of mindfulness? “Absolutely, definitely.” The self-examination, it seems, goes only so deep. For Rogers, it is what it is.
“You can call me crazy or confident, throwing 82 (mph) to big-league hitters, but I do.”