Now I'll never get to call Taylor Rogers "Tay-Tay"

Real missed opportunity

What will you remember about Taylor Rogers’s time as a Giant? For me, it’ll probably be that he was twins with Tyler Rogers, also on the Giants. And while Tyler is a right-handed submariner, Taylor throws conventionally from the left side and routinely hits the mid-90s with his fastball. Crazy! Bet you didn’t know any of those things!

Your turn! You have to pick something else, though. I already have dibs on the twins one.

Yes, after two years with the Giants, the team turned around and traded Taylor Rogers to the Reds, paying about half of his $12 million deal, and therefore saving themselves $6 million. In return, they received Braxton Roxby, a 25-year-old right-handed reliever with great stuff who had trouble throwing strikes last year in AA.

In other words, it was a salary dump, and not that good of one. $6 million in baseball terms certainly isn’t a small amount of money, but it’s also not backbreaking. If you want to find room for a $6 million player, you find it.

But the Giants went into the luxury tax last year, and since the penalties get worse with each successive consecutive year in which a team pays the luxury tax, they are incentivized to avoid doing it again. Saving that $6 million, then, could be the difference between being able to add at the trade deadline and having to stand pat, assuming that Giants are actually contending at the deadline, which is honestly just an adorable thing to prepare for.

Also, the rich people who own the Giants are likely tired of seeing their money thrown away on mediocre seasons, so they’ve cleverly solved this problem by throwing away less of their money on the mediocre Giants. Good job, everyone!

But why Rogers? Is his $12 million really more unjustifiable than Mike Yastrzemski’s $9.25 million? I mean, yes, probably, but if you can only find a taker for half of the $12 million, how does that affect the unjustifiability?

It’s not like Taylor Rogers was bad last year. He had a 2.40 ERA, and while the advanced stats — your xERA, your FIP, and so on — weren’t quite that enthused, clocking him somewhere between 3.29 and 3.72, he still graded out as a good pitcher. But there were signs of decline. Rogers’s strikeout rate was way down, his velocity was slipping, and a big part of that low ERA came from an unsustainably high strand rate. If the reliever after you doesn’t let your runners score, that’s pure luck, and Taylor Rogers saw more of that than you would expect last year.

Perhaps the most damning thing of all, though, was that Bob Melvin absolutely did not trust Rogers one bit. Of the seven most used Giants relievers, Taylor Rogers was the one who was called in for the least crucial situations. The average leverage index when he came in was the lowest on the team, even lower than Sean Hjelle, who would enter blowouts solely to eat as many innings as possible. And if you don’t like stats, then just remember the experience of watching the Giants last year, wondering why Camilo Doval, who on any given night had a 50/50 shot at being the worst pitcher you’d ever seen, in to face a lefty instead of Rogers in a tight spot.

From the left side, the Giants will now turn to Erik Miller, who had a nice 2024 even if his walk rate was worryingly astronomical, and possibly Joey Lucchesi, who’s had exactly one year in the majors with an ERA under 4, and with a K/9 around 6 and a BB/9 over 3, those results were never going to be sustainable. Is that enough for the team to cobble together effective relief from the left side? Maybe! I’m skeptical, but maybe!

But of course, the most gutting effect of this trade is that it broke up the Rogers twins. It was a fun story to see them together on the same team, as everyone else had a hard time figuring out who was who. Most importantly, it was a cool novelty, and I am aware that cool novelties rarely seem important, but in this case, it made the game more fun. Oh look! Twin brothers on the same team! How nice! It’s the kind of dumb but cool situation that makes sports delightful.

All of that is gone now. We are left with just the comforts of payroll management and avoiding a player’s decline years. Taylor Rogers was a good pitcher for the Giants, even if the Giants weren’t sure about him, and the Giants could use more good players. But the brass decided they’d rather pay him $6 million to not pitch here than $12 million to pitch for them all season. The accountants say it makes sense, and who are any of us to contradict them?