Revisiting the Trevor Rogers Trade. Oof.

Usually, with a baseball trade, you want to avoid rushing to judgment. Like, did the Rays get fleeced when they traded David Price to Detroit in 2014, considering that the third piece they got in that deal, Willy Adames, was a starter for three years in Tampa Bay, then got traded again, and is still under team control in Milwaukee? Always in motion, said the great philosopher, is the future.

Usually.

Sometimes you need about three weeks to find out if a trade worked out for your team. So say the Orioles, who on Thursday demoted their big deadline acquisition, left-hander Trevor Rogers, to the minor leagues. The 2021 NL Rookie of the Year runner-up made four starts for Baltimore, totaling 19 innings in which he allowed 16 runs, as well as an opponent batting line of .338/.404/.514. For a presumptive playoff starter, it’s not ideal.

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

As a side effect of being the laughingstock of baseball for most of the late 2010s, Baltimore amassed a collection of prospects unmatched in the entire league. Some of those prospects turned into Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Grayson Rodriguez… the kind of core that could produce multiple MVPs if everything goes right, and form the foundation of a regular World Series contender.

It also produced a lot of prospects who fell into the 11 to 30 range on the organizational ranking: Future big leaguers, in many cases, but with future value grades of about 40, rather than the 55s and 60s you want to build your team around. At this deadline, the Orioles tried to cash in on players from this tier of their prospect list, as well as players who had been on this tier of the prospect list three or four seasons ago and have just become 40-grade big leaguers, full stop. Being limited to a 26-man active roster, there simply wasn’t room for all of them.

After a series of challenge trades and back-of-roster swaps, the Orioles’ liquidation sale returned Austin Slater, Eloy Jiménez, Seranthony Domínguez, Gregory Soto, Zach Eflin, and, well, Rogers.

It’s not quite the coup for Corbin Burnes that Mike Elias and his merry men pulled off over the winter, but it wasn’t too long ago that Rogers was one of the best young pitchers in baseball.

In 2021, he made 25 starts, struck out 28.5% of opponents with unusual velocity from a left-handed starter. And it didn’t seem fluky 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 just wasn’t all that good. By the time the Marlins cut him loose, Rogers’ ERA had ballooned to 4.53 — his best mark since his rookie season — and his strikeout rate had floated all the way down 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 get it, man. I was so in the tank for Rogers in 2021, and because my ability to process the passage of time has gone completely to pieces over… I actually can’t tell you when it happened, for obvious reasons. But 2021 doesn’t seem that long ago, and if Rogers was good then, surely he could rebound now. Moreover — and this is in no way meant as a criticism of Elias and his brain trust specifically, because I think every GM is like this on some level — you don’t get to run baseball ops for a major league team unless you have a lot of self-confidence. Maybe you don’t think you’re literally 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 other people can’t see.

So Rogers isn’t just a guy who has been good for only one season out of five in his career, he’s a potential find. Why give up a king’s ransom for Garrett Crochet when you can just build a Crochet on the 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 in that breakout 2021 season and across 2024. (The 2024 numbers include his Orioles stint, which comprises just 15% of his total batters faced this season.)

In 2021, he basically did everything well. Insofar as he had weaknesses, there were two: First, he walked more batters than would be ideal for a starter. Second, he didn’t induce many groundballs, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if he could keep the ball in the yard. Which he did, with a HR/9 rate of 0.41.

But since 2021, everything Rogers used to do well has fallen apart. In 2021, he had two knockout pitches: a four-seamer with exceptional arm-side run 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 an hour off his fastball, and supplemented it with a sinker that opponents are slugging .492 against and whiffing on just 10% of the time. That’s done no favors to his changeup, which has actually increased in average velocity.

So there’s stuff to fix. I might start with getting rid of the sinker, the purpose of which is not clear to me. Maybe tinker with his changeup to shed some velocity and bring that 6 mph gap up closer to 10, like it was in 2021. The Orioles had options, but apparently didn’t get around to any of them.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Rogers did throw his secondary pitches in the zone a lot more, enough that even over four starts it looks like a deliberate choice. How did that go? Well, with Miami, Rogers’ opponents had an xwOBA of .298 and a whiff rate of 27.6% against his slider. In four starts with Baltimore, those numbers were .427 and 19.4%.

I concede that it’s not always possible to fix a pitcher overnight, but the overhaul that will restore Rogers to his previous glory is yet to be seen. If it’s coming at all.

Which leaves the Orioles in a bit of an awkward position. This is one of the best lineups in baseball, as it was in 2023, when that offensive élan went to waste, as Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez struggled in their postseason debuts, leaving the Orioles with no choice but to give Dean Kremer the ball in an elimination game. That went about how you’d expect.

That’s why I was so excited about the Burnes trade: It gave the Orioles not just a bona fide ace, but with Bradish and Rodriguez one year older and John Means on the mend, this rotation suddenly had the depth to go best-of-seven with anyone.

Well, Bradish and Means both need Tommy John surgery. The only good thing to say about Rogers’ Orioles tenure is that if he takes the long way to Norfolk down US Highway 13, he can see all the best underwater highway tunnels on the East Coast in one afternoon. More than that, Rodriguez and Eflin are both currently on the IL as well. Eflin’s shoulder injury seems to be relatively minor, though Rodriguez seems to be in a cross-your-fingers situation regarding a return before the end of the season.

All of that leaves the Orioles in the likely position of starting Kremer in an elimination game again.

I guess it’s too early to write off this trade definitively, since the Orioles still have two more seasons of team control on Rogers, past this one. And who knows if Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers, the two young players they sent to Miami, will ever amount to anything anyway?

But insofar as the purpose was to reinforce the Orioles’ rotation for this pennant race, even as nothing more than a depth option, this trade’s been a failure. I absolutely understand why they made this move, but things have gone about as far south as is possible in just three weeks.