Tyler Rogers is great at making good hitters look bad, but is it simply skill or is it born of an innate desire?
Tyler Rogers is one of the best relievers on the San Francisco Giants and in all of baseball Major League Baseball with a funky release and break on his pitches that frequently embarrasses professional hitters. It got me thinking… does Tyler Rogers dream of batters hitting themselves with one of his pitches? Does his id delight in such torments?
We know that pitchers can be bullies, control freaks, weirdos, and head cases, but can they be dreamers, too? We know that they thrive on defined roles and heavy preparation to reduce as much uncertainty as possible — this practice is what helps them forget a bad appearance and be fresh for the next one. But does the pressure created by these restrictions have a release? When a reliever hits the pillow, does he dream about baseball? And if so, does he dream about embarrassing opposing hitters?
Tyler Rogers carries himself so seriously and professionally that it suggests there might not be much room for whimsy in his unconscious mind. This is far from a slight. He’s good natured and even keeled. Lights up when he talks about his family, too.
We can never really know someone through media appearances, of course, but permit me to opine that based on everything I’ve ever read about or heard from Tyler Rogers, I label him A Good Person. From that, I would draw a conclusion that he sees pitching as “doing a job” and when he gets the outs required he’s done it successfully. When he imagines anything about baseball, it’s probably about pitch sequencing and individual matchups.
If that assessment is accurate, then it stands to reason that his unconscious mind does not foam up images like this during a REM cycle:
That’s 16-year veteran Carlos Santana hitting himself in the helmet with a foul tip off of Tyler Rogers’ sinker. His slider is nastier:
Who can forget this famous moment from last season:
Now, Kevin Gausman predicted something exactly like this would happen someday…
But did Tyler Rogers dream it? Visualizing success isn’t the same as a dream. There are lucid dreamers, of course, and there’s meditation… but what about dozing off on the bus ride from the airport to the hotel or a little nap on a Sunday afternoon during the offseason? Or is he one of those people who doesn’t dream about work? Or dream at all? Whose dreams, if he has them, rarely include people he knows (that’s me). Does he only dream about ordering a Subway sandwich (toasted, of course)?
I really want to know. The name of the game over the past decade or so has been velocity. And yet, Rogers has thrived without velocity. If he’s like most people, then there’s some part of him that ought to get a kick out of seeing hitters react to his pitches. That’s got to seep into the psyche somewhere.
Pitchers are a little like doctors with a god complex. After all, they know what pitch is coming. They get to dominate another person who is trying to get the better of them. Hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things to do in all of sports because a major league pitcher is one of the most dominant opponents in the world of sports. In his conscious mind, he has to believe he can get out any hitter, but does that same thought process lead him to believe he can get, say, Aaron Judge to look like a little leaguer on a swing? The first step towards making this video game episode become reality is to dream it:
Dreams are where our freak flags fly. Where our mind sorts out feelings and memories. Now, maybe he’s never dreamed of striking out Aaron Judge, but perhaps he’s dreamed of getting out a player who feels like Aaron Judge in such a silly way that it solidifies a subtle confidence he’d been feeling that day. Something like coming into a game with runners on and getting out of it unscathed leading to a dream later that night where Aaron Judge or an Aaron Judge avatar swings so hard that his body twists and twists and twists until the avatar’s head pops off. Or the swing is so bad because the pitch is so nasty that the bat snaps from the whiff alone. Or striking out Shohei Ohtani with three straight fastballs that all wind up hitting him.
I’m sure Tyler Rogers as a kid dreamed of making it to the big leagues someday, but now that he has, it’s a simple follow up question: does he dream about embarrassing hitters?