A lot can change in a year. Just ask Trevor Rogers.<\/p>\n
One year ago Friday, he was finishing his last turn through the Triple-A Norfolk rotation, a disappointing end to a tumultuous season. He had been traded to the Orioles and lasted just four starts here before being sent to the minors to watch the playoff chase he was acquired to help from afar. <\/p>\n
This time there\u2019s no playoff chase, just someone who is now 17 starts into a season in which he\u2019s looked like an ace. Rogers struck out seven Yankees<\/a> in six scoreless, one-hit innings Friday and in the process earned an appreciative ovation at Camden Yards from a fan base that\u2019s going to spend the winter hoping for a turnaround of similar proportion from this disappointing team. <\/p>\n That Rogers did it is example enough that it can happen for anyone and, more broadly, for the Orioles themselves. That\u2019s the hope \u2014 that whatever has made them one of the most puzzling and holistic disappointments in baseball this year will wash away over the winter and they\u2019ll regenerate as contenders in the Florida sun in February. <\/p>\n How Rogers did it, though, is the lesson the Orioles as a whole will have to apply. If he\u2019d changed nothing all winter and expected to go from someone with no confidence and whose fastball averaged 88 mph last September to this, it\u2019s almost assured he wouldn\u2019t be entering the last week of this season with a 1.35 ERA and 0.87 WHIP. <\/p>\n His honest look in the mirror and diligent work to rebuild his body<\/a> and free his mind<\/a> got him back to the pitcher who was an All-Star in 2021. He knew it wasn\u2019t going to work the way things were going. <\/p>\n So credit goes to Rogers and everyone he worked with \u2014 the Orioles\u2019 pitching coaches and strength staff, along with the folks at Driveline Baseball who spurred the process along. This is a turnaround story worthy of every bit of praise it\u2019s received, one that a sanguine Orioles fan can look at as evidence of a few things. <\/p>\n One is, on a basic level, that the Orioles\u2019 front office and coaching staff can get this whole pitching thing right. Kyle Stowers\u2019 All-Star season in Miami has complicated the view of that trade, but Rogers has more than held up his end of the deal now. Rogers was the reclamation project to end them all, and now he is a signature example of what\u2019s possible when everything clicks on the mound here. <\/p>\n That Rogers didn\u2019t debut until May 24 because of an offseason knee injury and wasn\u2019t in the rotation full time until mid-June also speaks to just how much went wrong this season. <\/p>\n Pretty much everything that was supposed to be good about this team wasn\u2019t, yet one of the gravest misfortunes is that this pitcher of whom little was expected couldn\u2019t be part of their disastrous rotation in April and May. He probably would have helped if he was ready. <\/p>\n Instead, his delayed start to the season meant that, by the time he was in the kind of form where he could contribute, the season had been tanked in part by the rotation he wasn\u2019t yet a part of.<\/p>\n If they were going to keep things static, the Orioles could view that as evidence that they\u2019re not far from being a contending team again: that Rogers was the best version of himself and the only thing wrong with that in a 2025 context is the timing of it all. <\/p>\n Same goes for so many of their core hitters being hurt or underperforming, and spending almost all of the season without Kyle Bradish or Tyler Wells. If you want to, you can hand-wave those factors away with the expectation that things will change because they\u2019re random. <\/p>\n This is a team that struggled to hit situationally down the stretch last year and chalked it up as one of those areas of the game that can fluctuate from year to year, only for it to happen again at the start of this season. This is a team that made sizable bets on platoon bats and on year-to-year performance splits carrying over, only for Tyler O\u2019Neill and Gary S\u00e1nchez to start the season dreadfully then miss most of the rest of it. <\/p>\n Mean reversion is a real thing. Everything that didn\u2019t work this year can work next year, and the Orioles can be good again because of it. An honest assessment might challenge that logic, though. Mike Elias and his team are going to have to decide how much of their roster and principles and philosophies and staff should stay intact and how much needs to be fortified. <\/p>\n That\u2019s all hard work, and the recognition of one\u2019s own faults can be as painful as the measures it takes to correct them. But, to hear interim manager Tony Mansolino refer to Rogers turning back the clock to the best version of himself by fixing what had gone wrong, you can easily draw a parallel to what the Orioles are hoping for as a whole. <\/p>\n Rogers acknowledged the scale of it \u2014 and how it didn\u2019t happen easily \u2014 after Friday\u2019s start.<\/p>\n \u201cFull circle,\u201d he said. \u201cI actually just saw a memory of my wife and I hanging out at an Airbnb in Norfolk this time last year, so just the amount of work that I\u2019ve put in \u2014 the pitching department, the strength department that\u2019s helped me so much. I\u2019m just thankful that the Orioles have helped me turn my career around, and I can go on and on about how much they\u2019ve helped me and what this organization means to me. At the end of the day, I\u2019m just happy that I can be consistent and continue to help this team win games and finish strong. I look forward to a good 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n There are lessons in there for those who look forward to the same. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lot can change in a year. Just ask Trevor Rogers. One year ago Friday, he was finishing…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":241614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[590,591,1266,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-241613","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-american-league","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115237056887754988","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241613","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=241613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}