TORONTO – As one of the first teams, if not the first, to check in when free agency opened, the Toronto Blue Jays made an early and immediate impression on Tyler Rogers.
The coveted leverage reliever with the submarine delivery and lowest release point in the majors had, over the years, heard good things about the franchise, so both he and his wife, Jennifer, appreciated and reciprocated that interest.
Earlier this year, a three-game Blue Jays sweep of his San Francisco Giants on July 18-20, and their eventual post-season run, helped settle matters for him from a baseball perspective. And as parents to three-year-old Jack and soon-to-be-one Nolan, they discovered that their family considerations would be taken care of, as well.
“When the American League champs give you a phone call you kind of perk up and get excited about that, a team that was really close to winning the World Series. That right there is a great start,” Rogers said Friday during an introductory Zoom call with Toronto media. “And the Blue Jays have a great reputation throughout the industry. Even before they made this World Series run, they had a great reputation for how they treat their players, their facilities and even more so, how they take care of the families. (The family) is going to be joining me in Toronto. That was a big part of tipping the scales.”
Factor in his $37-million, three-year contract with a vesting option for 2029 – the largest financial commitment the current front office has made to a reliever – and Rogers’ signing seems instructive of the way the Blue Jays are able to operate this off-season.
While their financial might and appealing facilities are not new, those strengths are being amplified by some newly gained World Series street cred, a dynamic that appears to be strengthening their standing in the market.
For instance, the Blue Jays not only wanted and got Dylan Cease, but they also got him early, with his Nov. 26 deal for $210 million over seven years – the off-season’s richest free-agent deal so far – a first flex. That helped them lock in on fellow starter Cody Ponce, who agreed to terms about a week later for $30 million over three years, providing more of the rotation depth they had identified as the most effective way to improve the roster.
Then, they chased those deals by giving Rogers the winter’s fourth-biggest financial commitment among relievers, behind only closers Edwin Diaz ($69 million, three years, Dodgers), Devin Williams ($51 million, three years, Mets) and Robert Suarez ($45 million, three years, Braves).
There’s a lot of big-game hunting in those three deals – arguably the market’s top available starter in Cease; a higher-end value-play for the starting staff in Ponce; maybe the top non-closer reliever in Rogers – which may reflect what lies ahead on the position-player side, too.
They remain engaged on Bo Bichette and Kyle Tucker and have kept their options open across that front, buoyed by a returning group that’s both capable and positionally versatile.
And though the Blue Jays tried to manage expectations at the winter meetings, where GM Ross Atkins said adding both impact to the bullpen and “another position player will be very difficult to do,” they’re positioned well in a market segment yet to really move, a destination top free agents are likely to check in with, at least, before acting.
Demonstrative of that, in spite of Atkins’ public posture, is Scott Boras, who represents Cease along with Cody Bellinger and Alex Bregman, saying at the winter meetings that the Blue Jays have given “us notice they’re going to continue to add both pitching and position players to really reach their championship goals.”
Rogers helps fulfil the pitching end of that notice and while much is being made of him and Trey Yesavage operating at the very opposite ends of the release-point spectrum, what really attracted the Blue Jays to him is that he gives the bullpen an entirely different profile.
Closer Jeff Hoffman, Yimi Garcia, Louis Varland, Braydon Fisher and Brendon Little are largely big-stuff, swing-and-miss pitchers who at times issue walks or get clipped for a home run. Rogers, on the other hand, is an extreme groundball pitcher (60.7 per cent last year, 56.6 per cent for his career) who in each of the past two seasons has issued 0.8 walks per nine innings, and has allowed 0.6 home runs per nine innings in 424 big-league innings over seven years.
All that makes Rogers a situational Swiss-Army knife capable of getting a double-play grounder to neutralize a leverage-inning jam or handling a late-inning pocket of hitters who are threats to both walk or go deep.
No matter the spot, the Blue Jays will be able to trust him to throw strikes and make the at-bat miserable for hitters trying to deal with his bizarro-world movement profile.
“I just really care about process-metric things, first-pitch strikes, two-out-of-three strikes, really I kind of try and live in that area, try to literally live in the strike zone as simple and dumb as that sounds,” Rogers said of his approach. “I don’t try and look too much into anything else because that’s who I am. If I try to get outside of that, I’m not very successful.”
Combine that with his remarkable durability – he’s made at least 68 appearances and thrown at between 70.1 and 81 innings in each of the last five seasons – and the bullpen will look different far beyond his submarine delivery.
And of wider importance is that as much as the Blue Jays chose him, like Cease and Ponce, he also chose the Blue Jays, reinforcing their strength in an off-season market that has plenty of inventory still to go.
