Giants reliever Tyler Rogers is without a doubt the strangest pitcher in the major leagues. No other active pitcher uses a submarine throwing motion like Rogers does—and even by the standards of other submariners, Rogers’s delivery is bizarre. He bends over and releases the ball just a few inches from the ground.
Not only do hitters have to try to decipher Rogers’s unique release point, they also have to recalibrate their brains to interpret the bizarre break of his pitches. For example, how many pitchers throw a slider that rises? None. Except for Rogers.
In Monday night’s game against the Diamondbacks, Rogers threw one of those rising sliders to Ketel Marte that Marte swung at and missed so violently that his helmet flew off.
Tyler Rogers, Alien Rising Slider. 🛸👽 pic.twitter.com/VpI93YEH2f
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 1, 2023
The second angle in that video really shows how impossible it is to hit Rogers’s slider. The slo-mo makes it easier to see that the pitch rises for almost its entire flight. Only at the last moment does it flatten out and perhaps begin to dip slightly due to gravity. How are batters supposed to hit a pitch like that when they spend their entire lives training to hit pitches thrown from eye level that then proceed to sink? It’s reminiscent of softball star Jennie Finch striking out Albert Pujols.
