Revisiting the Trevor Rogers Trade. Wow.

In general, with baseball trading, you want to avoid rushing to judgment. Like, did the Rays get wool when they traded David Price to Detroit in 2014, given that the third piece they got in that deal, Willy Adames, was a three-year starter in Tampa Bay, then traded again, and is still under. team control in Milwaukee? It is always in motion, says the great philosopher, the future.

In general.

Sometimes you need about three weeks to find out if a trade has worked for your team. So said the Orioles, who on Thursday demoted their biggest acquisition of the deadline, lefty Trevor Rogers, to the minor leagues. The NL Rookie of the Year runner-up pitched four innings in Baltimore, including 19 innings in which he allowed 16 runs, along with a .338/.404/ opponent batting line. 514. For a presumptive playoff starter, it’s not fair.

Philosophically, I get what the Orioles were trying to do.

As a side effect of being the laughingstock of baseball in the late 2010s, Baltimore has amassed a collection of prospects unmatched across the league. Some of those prospects turned out to be Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Grayson Rodriguez… the kind of core that could produce multiple MVPs if all goes well, and form the foundation of a regular World Series contender.

It has also produced many prospects that fall in the list of 11 to 30 ​​in the organizational level: Major league players of the future, in most cases, but with future prices of about 40, there are 55s and 60s that you want to build your team around. . At this deadline, the Orioles have tried to cash in on players from this level of the prospect list, as well as players who have been on this list for the past three or four seasons and are newly 40-year-old major leaguers, all over the place. Wait. Being limited to a 26-man roster, there wasn’t room for all of them.

After a series of trade challenges and back-of-roster changes, the Orioles’ closing trade brought back Austin Slater, Eloy Jiménez, Seranthony Domínguez, Gregory Soto, Zach Eflin, and Rogers.

It’s not exactly the coup of Corbin Burnes that Mike Elias and his merry men came out of the winter, but it wasn’t long ago that Rogers became one of the best young ballplayers.

In 2021, he made 25 starts, striking out 28.5% of opponents at a rate unusual for a left-handed starter. And it didn’t seem unreasonable at the time; he held opponents to a .214 batting average on a .301 BABIP, and his 2.64 ERA came with a 2.55 FIP.

But he had back spasms and a lat strain in 2022, missed almost all of 2023 with a biceps strain, and in between wasn’t so good. By the time the Marlins released him, Rogers’ ERA had reached 4.53 – his best mark since his rookie season – and his strikeout rate had dropped to 18.0%. At the time of the trade, he had the fifth-worst K-BB% among starters with at least 100 innings pitched.

And yet!

I hear you, man. I was in Rogers’ tank in 2021, and because my ability to process the passage of time is completely gone… I actually can’t tell you when it happened, for obvious reasons. But 2021 doesn’t seem that far away, and if Rogers was good then, he can certainly bounce back now. In addition – and this is by no means a criticism of Elias and his particularly confident mindset, because I think every GM is like this to some degree – you can’t run baseball ops for a major league team without a lot of confidence. Maybe you don’t think you’re the smartest person in the room all the time, but you have to believe that you can see things that other people can’t, or that you have the ability to hire people who can tell you. things that other people don’t see.

So Rogers isn’t just a guy who’s been good for one of the five seasons of his career, he’s someone who can be found. Why give up the king’s ransom of Garrett Crochet when you can crochet cheap? A confident GM will look at a pitcher like this and say the most dangerous phrase in the English language: “I can fix him.”

But what needed to be fixed? Here are Rogers’ percentile rankings in various statistics, both for that 2021 season and for all of 2024. (The 2024 numbers include his Orioles stint, which included just 15% of all batters he faced this season.)

In 2021, you are doing everything right. As for his weaknesses, there were two: First, he walked more batters than would be good for a starter. Second, he didn’t field many ground balls, which isn’t a bad thing if he can keep the ball in the yard. That he did, with a HR/9 rate of 0.41.

But starting in 2021, everything Rogers did well fell apart. In 2021, he had two groundout pitches: a four-seamer with an arm-side running exception that produced a .300 opponent wOBA, and a sinking changeup that produced a .213 opponent wOBA. Three years later, he’s lost more than two and a half miles per hour from his fastball, and added a sinker that opponents are throwing .492 and hitting just 10% of the time. That didn’t do anything to his changeup, which increased at a moderate pace.

So there are things you have to fix. I might start by removing the sink, the purpose of which I still don’t understand. Maybe consider his change to drop the speed and close the 6 mph gap to 10, as it was in 2021. The Orioles had options, but apparently didn’t land on any of them.

Well, that’s totally wrong. Rogers threw his second pitches in the zone a lot, enough that even starting more than four looks like an intentional pick. How did that go? However, with Miami, Rogers’ opponents had a .298 xwOBA and a 27.6% whiff rate against his slider. In four starts with Baltimore, those numbers were .427 and 19.4%.

I agree that it’s not always possible to fix a pitcher overnight, but the fix that will return Rogers to his former glory remains to be seen. If it comes at all.

Which leaves the Orioles in a very bad position. This is one of the best programs in baseball, as it was in 2023, when that attack took place sleep he was wasted, as Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez struggled in their first postseason game, leaving the Orioles with no choice but to give Dean Kremer the ball in the final game. That went about as well as you’d expect.

That’s why I was so excited about the Burnes trade: Not only did it give the Orioles a bona fide ace, but with Bradish and Rodriguez a year older and John Means about to be drafted, this rotation suddenly had seven-best pitching depth. and anyone.

However, Bradish and Means both required Tommy John surgery. The only good thing you can say about Rogers’ Orioles stay is that if he takes the long way to Norfolk down US highway 13, he can see all the tunnels of the East Coast’s best underwater highway in one afternoon. In addition, Rodriguez and Eflin are both currently in the IL as well. Eflin’s shoulder injury appears to be minor, although Rodriguez appears to be in tip-toeing mode regarding a return before the end of the season.

All of that leaves the Orioles with a chance to start Kremer in the playoffs again.

I think it’s too early to write off this trade for sure, as the Orioles still have two more seasons of team control from Rogers, beyond this one. And who knows what Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers, the two young players they sent to Miami, will ever become?

But since the goal was to strengthen the Orioles’ rotation in this pennant race, even if it was nothing more than a depth option, this trade was a failure. I totally understand why they took this step, but things have gone as far south as they can go in just three weeks.