Trevor Rogers’ 2025 season wasn’t really a “breakout.” It was more like a return to form with better returns.
The league saw flashes of what Rogers could be during the 2021 season. In that campaign, his rookie season in Miami, the big lefty was an All-Star, posting a 2.64 ERA and striking out 10.6 batters per nine innings.
From there, though, things took a turn for the worse.
The following season, Rogers’ ERA skyrocketed to a 5.47 as almost all of his underlying metrics got significantly worse. He appeared in just four games in 2023 before a disastrous 2024 season that showcased diminished velocity and an extended stay in Triple-A.
You know the drill from there.
The Orioles were able to identify some areas of growth for Rogers entering 2025, both physically and mentally, and all the lefty did was post one of the best starting pitching seasons in recent Baltimore history en route to a top-ten Cy Young finish.
Rogers’ journey in the big leagues has been tumultuous to say the least. The 28-year-old was anointed as one of the best young arms in baseball, only to be cast away before rising once more. This roller coaster ride begs the question: what can we possibly expect in 2026?
To answer that, we need to consider what aspects of his successful 2025 campaign can be considered “sticky,” and thus give us the ability to extrapolate.
The 1.81 ERA that Rogers posted isn’t expected to be repeated again, and underlying metrics would back that up. According to Statcast, Rogers’ expected ERA was up at 3.41, still in the 77th percentile in baseball, but a far cry from a sub-2.00.
That’s not to say that the lefty was exclusively lucky, though. Rogers was still in the 60th percentile or better in some key categories, including expected batting average against, chase rate, strikeout rate, walk rate and groundball rate.
While a pitchers’ tendency to throw swing and miss stuff or induce groundballs can be sustained from year to year, those metrics are still, inherently, hitter dependent. So, instead, let’s look at what Rogers himself can control: stuff and command.
The stuff is the easiest to see.
When Rogers joined the O’s in 2024, his fastballs averaged under 92 mph and were declining. In 2025, the heaters, a four-seamer and sinker/two-seam, were over 93 mph and ascending, often reaching close to 96 mph. As the former first-round pick explained, much of this had to do with improved strength training, allowing him to find more natural velocity within his usual mechanics.
Do your squats, no matter how much you may hate leg day.
Assuming that Rogers continues with his strength training, and there’s no reason to believe that he won't, given the success that it brought, it’s fair to count the decrease in velocity as the anomaly and the increased velo as the norm.
While the physical characteristics of pitches like his changeup and slider haven’t changed much, having two fastballs with improved velocity will make the rest of your pitches look better.
Now onto command, where Rogers again showed major strides. According to FanGraphs’ PitchingBot command grades, Rogers had the highest-grade command of his fastball, slider and changeup of any full season in his career.
His 66 percent first-strike rate and 58 percent overall strike rate were by far the highest, too, and forced hitters to take action. They had to swing, and they did, more often than any season in Rogers’ career. There were very few free passes or easy at-bats.
On those swings, which a pitcher, of course, can’t control, you can find the areas of potential regression.
A .226 batting average on balls in play from hitters he faced was second-lowest in baseball among pitchers with at least 100 innings thrown, according to FanGraphs. His hard-hit rate of over 48 percent, 3rd percentile in baseball, didn’t result in much damage, as his 5.5 percent home run per fly ball rate was lowest in the game with that same 100 inning qualification. Rogers’ left-on-base percentage of over 84 percent only trailed Tarik Skubal, Freddy Peralta and Garrett Crochet.
So, is there room for regression if hitters start having more results that match the process? Perhaps. But the expectation for Rogers in 2026 is not that he posts a sub-2.00 ERA once again. It is simply that he continues to build on a promising return to form en route to another solid season, even if it is one that appears worse on the stat sheet.
Let’s even say, as a hypothetical, that Rogers posted his expected ERA of 3.41 in 2025, pitching exactly how his predicted metrics would suggest he should’ve. That still would’ve been top-40 in the game among pitchers with a hundred innings, and O’s fans still would have been thrilled with that kind of production.
Yes, Rogers’ ERA may come back to Earth in 2026. Yes, perhaps some lucky factors played into making a really good 2025 an elite one. But what he could control dramatically improved, too, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t continue on its upward trajectory next season.