SAN FRANCISCO — The stage was set in the eighth inning Wednesday afternoon.
San Francisco Giants right-hander Tyler Rogers was attempting to preserve a 5-3 lead. Yordan Alvarez, one of the league’s most talented and dangerous hitters, represented the tying run as he stepped to the plate for the Houston Astros. In Alvarez’s previous at-bat, Logan Webb threw him an ankle-high slider and got the chase swing he was seeking. Webb did not get the result he was seeking, however. Alvarez somehow sent a backspun drive over the center field fence for a home run.
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Rogers, facing Alvarez with the game on the line, might have felt less a pitcher and more like a tiger tamer. He threw a ball on the first pitch. It would have been totally understandable to his teammates, to his coaches and to 35,000 fans at the Giants’ waterfront ballpark if Rogers had thrown three more.
Instead, Rogers fired a 1-0 strike from his submarine delivery. He fielded a weak groundball. He started a 1-6-3 double play to end the inning, and after three more outs from closer Camilo Doval in the ninth, the Giants pocketed their victory and a best-of-three series win.
“Most important pitch of the game,” Giants manager Bob Melvin said of the double play in the eighth.
So important, in fact, that it set a major-league record.
The confrontation with Alvarez was merely the latest example in what’s becoming an unprecedented season for the Giants’ longest-tenured pitcher and setup man. Rogers leads the major leagues with 35 appearances. He’s issued just one walk all season. And it was intentional.
According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the previous modern major-league record for consecutive appearances to start a season without an unintentional walk had belonged to Detroit Tigers left-hander Jamie Walker in 2006. Walker (oh, the irony) pitched in 34 games that season before he issued the first free pass of his own free will.
Now the record belongs to Rogers. And the 33-year-old is making his strongest case yet that he belongs in the National League bullpen for the All-Star Game.
“He’s got great touch on both his pitches and he can make them look different, too,” Melvin said. “You see the upshoot slider, you see the wrap slider, you see the sinker that goes down and the one that moves to the side. He’s got a really good feel for where the baseball is going right now.”
Warning:
Tyler Rogers Rising Slider may be hazardous to your health (or face) pic.twitter.com/q14qVZxPhI
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 5, 2024
Melvin didn’t need to be reminded that Rogers’ only walk this season was ordered from the dugout rail. It happened amid the New York Mets’ three-run rally in the ninth inning on May 26, when the Mets strung together four hits against Rogers to claim a walk-off victory at Citi Field.
The intentional walk didn’t work out. But it gave Rogers something useful: a denominator.
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The average major-league pitcher records 2.68 strikeouts per walk. The league’s best K/BB ratios are often four to five times higher than that. Tampa Bay’s Zach Eflin is the current leader among major-league starters with 12.5 strikeouts per walk.
You don’t need a calculator to figure out Rogers’ 23.0 K/BB ratio. It’s pretty simple when the denominator is one.
For reference, Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley holds the single-season major-league record (minimum 50 innings) for K/BB ratio. He struck out 18.33 batters for every walk in 1989 when he served as the closer on the Oakland A’s World Series championship team. Rogers and the Giants still have nearly 60 percent of the season to go. There are bound to be situations that call for extreme caution with a base open. There are bound to be times when Rogers won’t get the call on a borderline pitch or he doesn’t have his best command.
But 40 percent of a season is a pretty wide swath to have in the books. And Rogers is pounding the strike zone better than he ever has.
One of his teammates appreciates what he’s seeing more than any other: left-hander and identical twin brother Taylor Rogers.
“He just seems ultra-focused this year,” Taylor Rogers said. “It’s an extreme focus every day. His preparation has been unbelievable and we’re seeing the results. I don’t know if there’s a reason because he more or less did the same thing in the past. Maybe it’s because he’s finally taken over the eighth (inning) and said, ‘This is mine,’ and he takes that to heart. That’s how he’s going to help the club. Everybody who plays here knows they’ll face Ty in the eighth. I think he really enjoys that.”
Last Friday at Texas, Tyler Rogers walked through the clubhouse with two baseballs in a Ziploc freezer bag and handed them to clubhouse manager Brad Grems. They were game-used balls from his appearance that night, when he tossed a scoreless eighth inning in the Giants’ 5-2 victory over the Rangers. He recorded his 100th career hold — a statistic that is still arcane to most fans but means a great deal to the non-closer relief pitchers who make up nearly a third of major-league rosters.
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Tyler Rogers is one of 11 active relief pitchers who have reached the 100-hold mark. His brother likely will join that group shortly. Taylor has 97 career holds.
“I’m guessing that may have come up in their discussions, no?” Melvin said, grinning.
Taylor, of course, also has 83 career saves. He served as a closer in Minnesota, Milwaukee and San Diego before signing a three-year, $30 million contract to join his brother in San Francisco before last season. When Taylor made an All-Star team in 2021 with the Twins (more irony), his twin brother joined him on the gala’s red carpet. Taylor would like nothing better than to do the same for Tyler this time when the game is played in Arlington, Texas, next month.
There is poignancy in Tyler’s late-career success. When the brothers were growing up in suburban Denver, Taylor was the one who had the All-State accolades and the Division I scholarship to the University of Kentucky. Tyler nearly quit the high school team as a senior. He played baseball for fun at Garden City Community College in Kansas, where he went to study fire science and uphold a five-generation legacy of firefighting, when a coach, Chris Finnegan, suggested that he drop down and throw from underneath. Tyler parlayed his success into a spot on the team at Austin Peay University and then into pro ball.
Even now, when both brothers are successful big leaguers, Tyler is playing catch-up in a sense. Because Taylor made it to the big leagues three years earlier, he’s the one who reached free agency quicker and has the big contract.
But no matter how equal or unequal their outcomes, this is one sibling relationship that has been devoid of rivalry.
“I’m just so happy and proud of him and what he’s doing,” Taylor said. “I don’t need to sit there and go, ‘This is his turn,’ or ‘It’s my turn to take a back seat and support him.’ I’m going to support him anyway. That’s easy. Maybe that’s something our parents would say: ‘Support your brother.’ But I’ve never needed direction to do that.”
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While Tyler continues to pair with Ryan Walker as effective set-up men for Doval, Taylor has had to adjust to a less-leveraged role. He’s been brought in to rescue a struggling starter in the fourth inning or to pitch the obligatory outs in the eighth when the Giants are down multiple runs. In terms of average leverage index, which measures how much pressure a pitcher faces in an appearance, only Randy Rodríguez has been used with less on the line.
It hasn’t been lost on Melvin that he’s asked Taylor Rogers and Luke Jackson, who pitched in a setup role in Atlanta, to swallow their pride this season.
“I’ve made sure to talk to both of them,” Melvin said. “They don’t make a big deal out of it, but they have a lot of pride. It’s uncomfortable for them. So I address it and typically these things swing around as the season goes along. Especially in Taylor’s case, he’s used to closing games or being that lefty who gets their big lefty out. Right now Erik Miller is more in that role but it doesn’t mean it won’t swing back around.”
Jackson has struggled to a 5.68 ERA but Taylor Rogers hasn’t pitched poorly by any measure. He has a 2.39 ERA and he’s allowing an average of 7.5 hits with 10.9 strikeouts per nine innings. His average sinker velocity of 93.2 mph is down a bit from the 95.7 mph he averaged as an All-Star in 2021 but it’s not as if his stuff has plummeted. It’s more that Miller has been in the zone with a fastball that has touched 99 mph. And among major-league analysts, velocity tends to overshadow career track records when it comes to predicting future success.
“It might be easier to take later in your career just because you’re more mature in your baseball life,” said Taylor Rogers, who joined his brother in Suisun City on Thursday to dedicate a Junior Giants field that bears their name. “Even when I was throwing those innings in Minnesota, I wasn’t closing all the time. So I’m used to it. Ultimately, you go in when the phone rings.
“And also, the rest of these guys are nasty, you know?”
The Rogers Brothers Junior Giants Field is now open in Suisun City, CA. 🎉 pic.twitter.com/BwEWcFwihi
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) June 13, 2024
Including the right-handed setup man who tops out at 82 mph. And has shown no fear of throwing strikes with it.
“There’s some brother bias here, but when Ty’s out there, traditional scouting reports are just not worth anything,” Taylor Rogers said. “There was always the narrative of when the league sees him a few times, they’ll get him. The league’s seen him now. But it’s just such a different look. How many foul balls do you still see over their dugout?
“That’s fun for me. I get little giggles out of some of the swings. I’m just so happy to be able to watch him in person.”
(Photo of Tyler Rogers: Bob Kupbens / USA Today)
Andrew Baggarly is a senior writer for The Athletic and covers the San Francisco Giants. He has covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades, including the Giants since 2004 for the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. He is the author of two books that document the most successful era in franchise history: “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” and “Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades and Other Thrilling Moments By the Bay.” Follow Andrew on Twitter @extrabaggs
