Eight years into Tyler Rogers' career, you know the deal by now.
The submarine-style Blue Jays right-hander throws the slowest fastball in the game (83.1 mph) and an upside-down slider, and he does all that throwing like literally no one else does. It doesn’t look like it should work, but it does; over the last five seasons, he’s got a 2.66 ERA in more than 400 innings, and when Toronto gave him a three-year contract last winter, it made perfect sense. He had been, after all, the best available reliever on the market.
The numbers keep piling up, even if the velocity doesn’t. Over the last three years, Rogers’ sinker has compiled 40 runs worth of value, making it the most valuable sinker in the game, ahead of Logan Webb. Forget sinker, really; over the same time, it’s the fourth-most valuable pitch of any type, where the top two are “Chris Sale’s slider,” which will take him to the Hall of Fame someday, and “Cristopher Sánchez's changeup,” which may take him to the NL Cy Young Award this year.
We’ve known the outcomes, because again, he’s been doing this for years now. We’ve assumed the "why," because it’s obviously not velocity. We’ve assumed that the slider that goes up and the sinker that stays down and the barely-off-the-ground release point lead to off-the-charts deception, because batters simply never see a pitcher like this. (Rogers famously cannot even be replicated by the Trajekt pitching machine that’s swept the sport, because it can’t throw like he does.)
That’s had to be good enough, because we know he’s been valuable and we know he’s been, for lack of a better term, weird. It’s with that in mind that when Baseball Savant released the newest Statcast metrics earlier this week, it wasn’t the fact that Mason Miller misses bats by the most distance (10.6 inches on his slider) that stood out to us the most. It was that when looking at which pitches make hitters the latest, it was … the slowest fastball in the Major Leagues.
(All stats below are entering Friday's games.)
What that’s saying is that 58% of swings on Rogers’ sinker result in late hacks, which is nearly three times the Major League sinker average of 21%. It’s by far the biggest late-making pitch of 2026. If we expand this look back to midseason 2023, when this data is first available, he’s No. 1 there, too -- ahead of Phillies relief ace Jhoan Duran, who routinely reaches triple-digit velocity.
"He's different,” catcher and then-San Francisco teammate Patrick Bailey told MLB.com’s David Adler in 2023. “The fastballs go down and the breaking balls go up. It's funny -- you get the reactions of hitters, and umpires even, and it's like, I'm glad I'm catching and not hitting or umpiring."
What does late look like? Let no less dangerous a hitter than A’s first baseman Nick Kurtz show you. Back on March 28, Rogers faced Kurtz in the ninth inning, and this is not a matchup you would normally consider to be a strong one for the Blue Jays. Kurtz, after all, merely had one of the best hitting seasons by a rookie on record last year, and he’s posted a wild line of .400/.530/.631 against righty sinkers in his short career.
Rogers’ first pitch was a sinker, low, taken by Kurtz for a strike. His second pitch was a sinker too, but higher in the zone, and also taken for a strike.
Given that Rogers only has two pitches, you’re probably assuming, if you’re Kurtz, the upside-down slider was next. It wasn’t. A third consecutive sinker followed, and Kurtz swung through it, late, for strike three.
Late, we cannot overemphasize here, on an 84 mph pitch.
Earlier this month, Rogers did it to Pete Alonso, too, getting a first-pitch swinging strike on an 83.7 mph pitch. What does "late" look like? On the video, it looks like this. Yet being "early" or "late" isn’t always visible clearly on the broadcast view, so if we were to go look at what the Statcast data is actually showing, this is what late looks like. So late.
“Better late than never,” as the famous saying goes. That might not quite apply here.
It all gets us a little closer to understanding how Rogers can succeed in the way he does. It’s because he makes batters late, improbably given his velocity, and he can do so better than any other pitcher.
While we’ve shown you how that manifests into a miss with a pair of strikeouts here, it’s really not even about the whiffs. (His 14.6% strikeout rate is one of the dozen lowest in the bigs.) It’s about preventing hard contact, something he’s also done at an elite level. Only two pitchers have a lower hard-hit rate allowed, and there’s only two pitchers this year who have yet to allow a single barrel, which is the Statcast term for “the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle.”
One is Miller, potentially the most dominant reliever who ever lived. The other is Rogers, who at times hasn’t even been the best pitcher in his own family.
We teased all this a bit back over the winter, when he signed with Toronto, because it has clearly been true over the last several seasons. But: Something is different this year. If batters have always been late, now they’re even later on Rogers's sinker.
% of late swings (sinker)
- 2023 // 43%
- 2024 // 45%
- 2025 // 49%
- 2026 // 58% ←-
What’s different? It’s not velocity, obviously; if anything, he’s throwing slightly slower than last year. It’s not really any noticeable change in movement, nor is he throwing from an even more subterranean level. There’s only two things that stand out in the data, which may (or may not) be responsible for this continued improvement.
For one thing, he’s throwing the slider in the zone a lot less often – from 46% last year, where it had been for many years, down to just 33% this year. It’s hard to say if that’s good or bad, because those labels don’t always apply to a pitcher like this in the way you’d expect, but it’s definitely different.
For another, he’s continued what had been a several-years-long trend of throwing the sinker more.
If seeing the pitch more often might make you think that it would expose it more to batters and give them the chance to time it up better, the exact opposite has happened.
“I’ve tried to hit it. I can’t. I haven’t hit it,” said Blue Jays slugger George Springer this spring, talking about his new teammate.
While he was speaking more about the slider than the sinker, the point remains. The two had only faced one another one time before Rogers came to Toronto, back in 2023 when the hurler was still with the Giants. Springer struck out on three pitches. He was, of course, late.