Here's Everything Tyler Rogers Brings to the Blue Jays

As the days following the Winter Meetings unfolded, all indications pointed toward the Toronto Blue Jays following through on their desire to pick up a big-time free agent reliever. One by one, the chips had begun to fall, with Ryan Helsley and Devin Williams coming off the market before the epicenter of the baseball world shifted to Orlando. Edwin Díaz and Robert Suarez followed earlier this week.

The anticipation finally subsided north of the border on Friday with the news of submariner Tyler Rogers inking a three-year, $37 million deal. On Saturday afternoon, The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal revealed the terms of a vesting option for 2029 that would pay Rogers an additional $12 million if he pitches either 110 combined games between 2027 and 2028 or 60 games in 2028. Since his debut in August 2019, Rogers has not pitched fewer than 68 games in a full season. He will be 38 by the time the 2029 season rolls around, so that vesting option is essentially the Blue Jays telling him he'll be rewarded with another year if he keeps doing what he's been doing by the time he's within striking distance of 40 years old. Buckle up: The jokes and fan activation opportunities that come from Rogers sharing a last name with his new team's ownership conglomerate are soon to rain down on all of us.

They might be easy to stomach, though, because (Tyler) Rogers is a very good pitcher who immediately makes this bullpen stronger. He has a 2.76 ERA and 3.31 FIP for his career, easily better than Jeff Hoffman, Yimi García, Louis Varland, and any notable external addition the Shapiro/Atkins regime has made to the bullpen since the pandemic (with all due respect to those guys, who should form one of the better units in the league next year). At no point during this recent stretch of Blue Jays baseball has there been a relief pitcher with a track record as consistently good as Rogers'. He was working on his second consecutive season with a sub-3.00 ERA when he was traded from the Giants to the Mets this past deadline, and ended up finishing with a sub-2.00 ERA while leading the NL in appearances for the fourth time in six years. 

Now that we've established some of what Rogers is, I'm going to mention one key thing that he isn't, because it provides some crucial context that is necessary to make sense of this deal: He was not the Blue Jays' first choice in the free agent relief market. According to Sportsnet's Shi Davidi, the team was actively courting Robert Suarez before he signed with Atlanta, and Rogers was their pivot in the event Suarez signed elsewhere. This news comes about a month after they reportedly met with Edwin Díaz's agents at the GM meetings in Las Vegas.

With a strong crop of free agent bullpen arms this year, there are certainly more traditional "stuff-ists" that could prove to be more of a bargain than Rogers. For how disappointing the results were for Devin Williams in 2025, he still struck out 35% of batters and maintained elite peripherals, he is still just a year removed from being widely considered a top-two closer in the game, and he signed for a considerably cheaper commitment than Díaz. The Detroit Tigers transformed Kyle Finnegan post-deadline and retained him on a two-year deal worth less than $20 million total. Brad Keller, who only just turned 30, is still available after a dominant season in Chicago.

Still, league-wide demand for high-leverage relievers is enough that every established name on the market has been getting multi-year deals, even the ones coming off down years. Rogers, like Suarez, will be 35 on opening day, and giving a three-year deal to a 35-year-old reliever isn't the best idea in a vacuum. However, I would much rather give him three years than Suarez, mostly because of something alluded to earlier: His durability. Rogers has not been on the injured list since 2015, and he leads relievers in both innings pitched and appearances over the past five years.

Suarez also relies on elite velocity, sitting 98-99 mph on both his fastball and his sinker. This could become problematic if he continues to rely on both pitches a combined three-quarters of the time and loses some firepower on the wrong side of age 35. Rogers, a submarine pitcher who has maxed out in the mid-80s his whole career without any issues, does not have this concern. If there's any reliever from this free agent class I'd bet on at least staying in their current general neighbourhood of effectiveness by the end of their new contract, it's probably him.

Much has been made of Rogers' -61° arm angle, which changes everything about how he should be valued because his pitches do not move at all like they are supposed to. He's a two-pitch, sinker-slider guy, using the former way more than the latter. The sinker averaged 84 mph last year; the slider 74 mph. Of course, this does not matter, because the sinker moves like a mid-80s 12-6 curveball while the slider rises with extreme cut, with both practically being released from the ground. He is truly one of a kind in this way.

It's that bizarre delivery that has allowed him to become about as consistent as a reliever can be over the past few years. He absolutely pounds the zone, with a career walk rate of 4.4% that cratered even further recently, sitting at 2.2% since the start of 2024. Of all bullpen pitchers with at least 200 IP since the start of 2021, Rogers' average exit velocity against ranks second-lowest. His launch angle against is eighth-lowest. His barrel rate? Also second-lowest. Hard-hit rate? Sixth-lowest.

Yet, he has surrendered 1,191 balls in play in that timespan, 199 more than Brent Suter, the next-closest guy on the list. That's the same as the difference between the pitchers ranked second and 15th. One of the reasons command and pitch-to-contact arms, especially if they're relievers, aren't valued as highly as they once were is that their approach leads to greater variability. More hittable pitches and more balls in play equals a greater risk of the opponent stringing hits together, doing damage, or both. For a half-decade, way longer than any other pitch-to-contact reliever in the game, Rogers has found a way to defy this law because of how hard his movement patterns are on hitters' eyes by virtue of his release point. It's entirely possible the standard of variance that non-strikeout arms sign up for simply doesn't apply to him to the same degree, and the infield defense he'll have behind him makes him an even more logical fit for the Blue Jays.

Tyler Rogers Percentiles, 2023-25

Blue Jays Bullpen & Tyler Rogers Home Run Rates, 2023-25

The effect his delivery has on batters seems counterintuitive because of how slow his pitches move, but he's arguably better at routinely inducing late swings than anyone in MLB. A common proxy to measure hitter timing is attack angle, one of Statcast's new bat path metrics that measures the vertical direction of the bat's sweet spot at contact (not to be confused with swing tilt). Hitters had a 0° attack angle against Rogers in 2025, the lowest among all pitchers to face at least 200 batters. They made contact deeper towards the plate against Rogers than they did anyone except Chris Martin and Tim Hill, and when adjusting contact point for velocity (slower pitches are naturally struck farther in front of the plate), opponents were later against Rogers than anyone who surrendered 100 balls in play.

Aside from the immense degree to which it serves his own purposes, Rogers' alien release point also allows his coaches to mix and match the looks on their pitching staff. Arranging a bullpen with this in mind is a strategy popularized by the successful Rays and Brewers teams of the early 2020s – clubs that never spent on high-leverage relievers in free agency, but found a way to make it work by plugging holes with a diverse set of arm angles. Sportsnet's Shi Davidi reported earlier this month that the Jays are trying to follow this blueprint, which makes the recent acquisitions of Rogers and Chase Lee, as well as the use of a first-round pick on Trey Yesavage, quite intuitive.

Blue Jays Pitchers by Arm Angle

No, Rogers does not provide the velocity and strikeout stuff the Blue Jays' bullpen was lacking to an extent, but the chances of a positive return on that $12.3 million average annual value seem likely. Toronto continues to pay pitchers for showing consistent availability, which makes it seem silly in hindsight that both the Cease and Rogers contracts weren't plainly visible from a mile away.

Aggressively paying relievers left and right generally isn't good practice, considering how often and how long they suit up for, but big-picture, the Jays are doing a good job of straddling the line between the various bullpen-building strategies. Make no mistake, they have chosen to pounce on some free agents (Hoffman, García, Rogers), but some are reclamation projects (Nance, Lauer), while others are young, home-grown talent (Little, Fluharty, Fisher). It's good that the team still has money for its needs on the position player side now that the most pressing requirements on the pitching side are taken care of.

Rogers may not have been the best option available, but he undeniably makes this team better and flashes considerable potential to make this a wise investment for the duration of his term, especially considering some of the other avenues the Jays could have pursued.