high-profile deal for Adley Rutschman<\/a>. Rogers was included in the swap.<\/p>\n\u201cA shock,\u201d Rogers said.<\/p>\n
After a short flight to Boston, his first game with the Red Sox was against none other than his current employer, the White Sox. Rogers caught the last three innings of a 13-inning epic. He hit a sacrifice fly to help tie the game in the 12th inning.<\/p>\n
In Boston, Rutschman started on the IL, and as he neared activation, Rogers saw the writing on the wall. By Aug. 11, after all of nine plate appearances, the Red Sox activated Rutschman and sent Rogers back into DFA purgatory.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Craig) Breslow and everybody in Boston couldn\u2019t have been nicer and handled the whole situation perfectly,\u201d Rogers said.<\/p>\n
The next team to come calling was the White Sox, who have a league-worst .518 OPS from their catchers this season. Rogers got the word Friday. He had already flown from Toronto with the Red Sox back to Dallas.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of flying around and a lot of mileage points, for sure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Soon, he was on a plane back to \u2014 of all places \u2014 Detroit, where the White Sox were playing a three-game weekend set against the Tigers with American League Central stakes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI texted him and told him, \u2018Baseball\u2019s really weird,’\u201d Hinch said.<\/p>\n
Said Rogers: \u201cOf course it would happen like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saturday morning, Rogers was out on the field, holding court with a host of former teammates. He was starting behind the plate that day, and somehow, he found appropriate catching gear. In Baltimore, he had borrowed gear from catcher Chadwick Tromp while he awaited his own Mizuno order. Throughout this journey, Rogers has had to learn new pitchers and study different scouting reports on the fly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe craziest thing is trying to learn each guy\u2019s tendencies and what they like to throw,\u201d Rogers said. \u201cYou can look at it on paper, but it means more coming from the guys and catching them one or two times to learn it. \u2026 It\u2019s been a school of hard knocks situation, but we\u2019re making our way through it.\u201d<\/p>\n
For his first at-bat Saturday, fans at Comerica Park rose and gave Rogers a standing ovation. Tiger starter Troy Melton backed off the rubber to offer a brief pause. Over the PA system, they even played Rogers\u2019 old walk-up song \u2014 the Garth Brooks ballad \u201cFriends in Low Places.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe obviously meant a lot to everybody in this locker room,\u201d Melton said. \u201cIt can\u2019t be overstated how important he was, personally helping me become a major-leaguer, not only the stuff on the field but off of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rogers proceeded to bunt into a rare 1-5-4 double play, but his new team still went on to beat his old one. Rogers has now experienced a bundle of different clubhouses, from the Tigers who have underachieved but fought to keep their season afloat, to a scuffling Orioles squad to a red-hot Red Sox team. Now in Chicago, Rogers is part of an unexpected division leader, a club that just swept the Tigers to maintain a stranglehold on the AL Central. With White Sox catcher Kyle Teel working his way back from an ankle sprain, there\u2019s no guarantee Rogers will be with the White Sox for the rest of the year.<\/p>\n
Such is the life of a journeyman catcher. It is a life Rogers is learning quickly and learning well.<\/p>\n
On most mornings as a Tiger, Rogers sat at his locker and filled out the Immaculate Grid \u2014 the baseball-reference trivia game that involves matching athletes to teams and statistical criteria.<\/p>\n
As a personal challenge, Rogers liked to attempt to fill out the grid using only catchers.<\/p>\n
Over the past three weeks, one name just became much more valuable on the Immaculate Grid.<\/p>\n
His own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT \u2014 Jake Rogers walked down the visiting clubhouse hallway at Comerica Park on Saturday, and if he…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1007193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[1274,1885,1266,62,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-1007192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-chicago-white-sox","tag-detroit-tigers","tag-mlb","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117112752395640999","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1007193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}