Orioles interim manager Tony Mansolino gathered his players last week in the visiting clubhouse at Petco Field in San Diego.

He had a story to share, about perseverance, that he thought they needed to hear. It was a tale of someone who had hit rock bottom, climbed his way up and was now not only physically strong but mentally better for it.

And that person just so happened to be in the room with them: Trevor Rogers, who had just been named American League Pitcher of the Month almost a year to the day after he had been optioned to Triple-A following a disastrous four starts with the Orioles after the team acquired him from Miami.

This time last year, Rogers was lost and weak, disoriented in a new organization and contemplating leaving the sport. But an offseason of physical and mental work has turned him into a different pitcher, and person.

Rogers is not only an uplifting tale; he’s a rare bright spot in a season with very little to celebrate and a key part of the team as it prepares to try to contend next season.

“We do have some guys here that are maybe not having the years that they want and need to bounce back next year,” Mansolino said. “To see him come out on top of all the adversity he had, it’s awesome for Trevor and it’s a great lesson for our guys to learn.”

Now, being named Most Valuable Oriole, an award voted on by local media members, is a real possibility for Rogers. So is being a finalist for the American League Cy Young Award or even Comeback Player of the Year, although Rogers’ late start to the season might ruin his chances. His ERA of 1.51 is the lowest among American League starters with a minimum of 90 innings pitched.

If Rogers had heard a year ago that this is where he would be now, 80% of him wouldn’t have believed it. But 20% of him knew he had more in him, and that small percentage is what propelled him to keep going.

“Deep down, I always had that belief that I could get back to where I knew where I could be, but at that time it didn’t look like it was going to happen anytime soon,” he said. “[The Orioles] knew, probably more than I did, the plan they had in place for me and getting me back to where I needed to be.”

Physical changes

There was a time when success was all Rogers knew. He was a star at Carlsbad High School in New Mexico, leading his team to the state championship game. When it came time for the 2017 draft, Major League Baseball flew him to New York City to showcase the young southpaw on national television. He was picked by the Marlins 13th overall, his town so proud it welcomed him back with a parade featuring the mayor and a police escort.

He flew through the minors, earning his major league promotion in 2020. COVID-19 restrictions were in place, so the only people who could watch his first seven starts in person were cardboard cutouts.

When fans returned in 2021, he put together a stellar rookie season, pitching to a 2.64 ERA, making the National League All-Star team and finishing second in Rookie of the Year voting.

So, when he experienced a bad stretch for the first time, it was chalked up as a sophomore slump — he pitched to a 5.47 ERA in 23 starts in 2022. It didn’t end there, though.

This was the first time he had experienced any kind of failure, and he couldn’t figure out how to claw his way out. Back problems, followed by a biceps injury, forced him to make adjustments just to stay on the mound. He stopped lifting weights, which he thought was the right thing to do to deal with the pain, but his velocity dipped to the low 90s, even the high 80s.

He got by, but, when he was traded to the Orioles at the midseason deadline in 2024, he looked nothing like the pitcher Orioles pitching coach Drew French remembered seeing when he was coaching Atlanta and facing Rogers often.

“I think a lot of it for guys here is an effort to survive,” French said. “The way he trained and prepared himself, these guys are all really good compensators. They are very good when a knee may be hurt, but they put the load in some other place. He was really, really good about doing that.”

After Rogers allowed 15 earned runs in 19 innings, the Orioles optioned him to Triple-A. They viewed him as a long-term project, and, with the team in a playoff hunt, they couldn’t teach and try to win at the same time.

The Orioles did things differently than Miami. Rogers no longer could call his own pitches, and they relied far more on analytics than the Marlins did. It was difficult for him to pick up in a short time.

The same day he was sent down, the Orioles used force plates — a platform with sensors that measures power production — to gauge Rogers’ strength. He measured in the bottom tier of MLB players, a startling statistic for a player who had been in the league for four seasons, but in a way it was a relief. This was a problem he could solve.

Rogers was already considering working with Driveline Baseball in the offseason — the Marlins’ bullpen coach had a connection there and dropped the idea in his head before he was traded — but this forced him to put aside his hesitations and go all in.

In November, Rogers flew to Scottsdale, Arizona, to begin training. The three-day trip focused entirely on strength. He was wary of certain movements because of his history with back issues, so his lower-body workouts involved almost exclusively dumbbells. The regimen was difficult — Tessa Rogers said her husband spent most of the winter hobbling, so sore he was unable to walk normally.

In January, he went back to Scottsdale, the focus this time on his mechanics. He no longer needed to overcompensate for his lack of strength, so they focused on loading more with his legs. They also worked on his arm angle, which had dropped during the 2024 season, contributing to his loss of velocity.

“There was definitely some stuff in the lower half that was influencing some stuff up top, his arm action, his ability to kind of like send energy up through the body and back into the baseball,” French said. “Some of that was a byproduct of how he had trained himself for a couple of years, and so being healthier, being a little more diligent about how he develops strength and power and maintains that through the course of the season, honestly that was some of the lowest-hanging fruit that was available to him.”

Mental changes

In the corner of the Orioles’ clubhouse, Rogers sits with his AirPods on, seemingly oblivious to the hubbub around him.

In his ears, he’s alternating between two podcasts — “Mental Performance Daily With Brian Cain” and “The Hard 90 With Zach Sorensen.” He listens to them every day, all part of a routine that’s been crafted to give him a sense of control and establish small wins throughout the day.

When Rogers arrived in Baltimore last July, he was in a new environment, stripped from the only organization he had ever known. He looked around the clubhouse and, instead of seeing his friends such as Braxton Garrett and Anthony Bender, he found unfamiliar faces. He hardly talked in Miami as it was, and for a shy guy, it was a daunting task to find his way.

As Jacob Stallings, whose locker was next to Rogers in Miami for two seasons and who later caught him for part of the season in Baltimore, put it: Rogers has never been an outgoing guy.

“I used to always have to tell him to be quiet because he talked so much,” Stallings joked. “But, no, he hardly talked ever.”

There were the added expectations that came with being traded to a team in the hunt for the division.

“He was so nervous when he got here last year because he was trying to prove to people he didn’t know that he belonged here, and at the same time he was trying to prove to himself that he still belonged,” Tessa Rogers said. “It’s hard to do that, he wasn’t comfortable.”

Trevor Rogers was uncomfortable in Baltimore, to say the least. As his performance dipped, and he didn’t have his support system nearby, he isolated himself, even from his family, and contemplated whether baseball was still for him.

Last winter, even as he focused on the physical changes and started to see that pay off, he wasn’t convinced he wanted to keep playing. He didn’t know what he would do if he weren’t a baseball player. He didn’t have a college degree or an alternative career interest.

It took tough conversations with Tessa to convince him to keep going. She reminded him that he was only 27 and that some players are just making it to the big leagues at his age, and here he is, years into his career with so much still ahead of him.

“I was like I think, if you quit now, you would always think, ‘What if I kept trying later on?’” Tessa Rogers told Trevor. “I said don’t stop until you know for sure. I think just like talking that through and being realistic and taking some of the emotion out of it helped him, like, ‘OK, I need to stop being dramatic.’”

But Rogers and his wife also knew he couldn’t continue down the path he was on. When the thought of going to spring training became too overwhelming, he sought the help of a sports psychologist. His self-worth had become too dependent on how well he threw a baseball.

To get past that, he had to learn that pitching is his job, not who he is. Now he has a routine that sets him up for success. Every morning, he makes the bed and reads “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching.”

At night, he writes affirmations in a journal, repeating his goal over and over. Then he reads a devotional and a book for fun, usually U.S. history, his preferred genre.

“If I’m trying to have a successful day and I can’t even make my bed, what’s the point?” he said. “It’s kind of like those small victories so I’m not relying everything on my performance in the field. If I have a bad day, I still had all these small accomplishments throughout the day. I’m not hanging everything on what I do for a living. It’s been a very nice adjustment from a mentality standpoint that I used to be at.”

He’s also worked with the Orioles on combining the old-school approach of the Marlins and the new-school view of his current team. That includes calling his own pitches early in counts but with input from the pitching staff.

Beginning the year late due to a knee injury and being placed in Triple-A to start the season might have been the key to giving him enough time to perfect his new physical and mental games. But it also might come back to hurt him when awards are handed out.

“Who’s pitched better than that guy in the time that he’s been here?” Mansolino said last month. “If he’s pitched better than everybody else and he hits the thresholds, then he should win.”

Detroit’s Tarik Skubal is the front-runner to win the American League Cy Young Award for the second year in a row. His 2.10 ERA is higher than Rogers’ 1.51, but Skubal has made 28 starts, nearly double what Rogers has.

With the Orioles moving to a six-man rotation, Rogers will likely make only three more starts, giving him 18 for the season and roughly 115 innings. Outside of the COVID-shortened 2020 season, no starting pitcher has won a Cy Young Award with fewer than 150 innings pitched. The last eight winners averaged about 190.

“I haven’t put a whole lot of thought into it. I try to keep my focus very short, just stuff that I can control,” Rogers said. “Just being in consideration for those types of things is an honor.”

As history has shown, Rogers’ season likely wasn’t long enough, although he might earn votes for the first time in his career. But that wasn’t his goal. His mission was to get back to being himself, and he’s more than exceeded that.

“I think people that know him and have known him for a while always knew that he had it in him,” Tessa Rogers said. “He’s a competitor, he wants to be the best, and I think that’s why it was so hard for him when he struggled because he wasn’t being his best and he knew he was capable of so much more and he just couldn’t produce those results. Now it’s all coming together.”