Tyler Rogers’s Rising Slider Is Still Baseball’s Coolest Pitch

It's still baseball's coolest pitch.

Giants reliever Tyler Rogers has been in the majors for five years now, but seeing him pitch still never gets old. 

Rogers, who has spent his entire career with San Francisco, was joined in the Giants’ bullpen this season by his brother, Taylor. The two are twins. They’re both 6'3" and lanky, with similar facial features, so it’s easy to get them mixed up—unless they’re on the mound. But the biggest difference between Tyler and Taylor isn’t that Tyler is a righty and Taylor is a lefty. It’s that Tyler’s knuckles almost rub the dirt when he pitches. 

Tyler’s signature pitch is a slider that, because it’s released from so close to the ground, rises almost the entire way to the plate. It’s a sight to behold from any camera angle, but this view from behind home plate really illustrates how impossible it is for batters to handle the pitch. 

Good luck with that. 

But of course, Rogers’s slider can’t actually keep rising over the course of 60 feet. (Here’s a good angle showing how it dips.) The one you see above, which Rogers threw on a 1–2 count to strike out T.J. Hopkins on Monday night, actually dropped 33 inches, according to Statcast. In terms of the amount of vertical and horizontal break, Rogers’s slider is actually pretty average. But try telling that to guys like Hopkins who have to deal with trying to track it coming up out of the ground.