ROGERS - Three or four runs - that’s all the Rogers baseball team’s pitchers ask.

They’ll gladly take it from there.

Give the Eagles’ pitching staff that kind of cushion and it’s nearly lights-out.

“If our offense can give us that . . . we’ll win most games,” said sophomore relief specialist Gregory Mendoza.

It’s not that the Eagles, the reigning Class 2A state champions, are overconfident. No, Rogers simply knows it has enough quality pitching that it can slow down just about any offense.

And the Eagles’ pitching combination of starters Dylan Kuehn, Chance Marek and Travis Perkins and reliever Mendoza has shown that already, holding opponents to less than three runs per game.

Winner of its last 10 playoff series, Rogers (26-8) will begin a 2A Region IV quarterfinal series against No. 2-ranked Lexington (25-4-1) at 7 p.m. today at Nelson Field in Austin.

Depth is the reason the Eagles have thrived with a pitching-by-committee approach. No matter the situation, any one of the four is a candidate to take the mound and help wiggle his team out of trouble.

And usually when the reliever - mostly Mendoza - has come in, he’s slammed the door on Rogers’ opponent.

“When we’d get in trouble, we’d go to someone else,” coach Craig Coheley said. “We found out it worked well for us, so it became a pattern.”

A year after star pitchers Taylor Jungmann, Alan Valenzuela and Ricky Brenek led Rogers to its first-ever state title, that pitching-by-committee system has paid off for these young Eagles - especially in the playoffs.

They have dropped their earned-run average to 2.07, and Kuehn, Marek, Mendoza and Perkins each has an ERA of 3.15 or better.

Kuehn, a hard-throwing senior who’s second on the team with a 1.09 ERA, has been Rogers’ ace in the first two rounds. He’s 2-0 in the playoffs with a pair of shutouts and has allowed just nine hits - all singles - in two postseason starts.

Mendoza struggled in two-thirds of an inning - allowing two hits and three walks - in Game 1 of Rogers’ bi-district series against New Waverly. But he rebounded in impressive fashion later in the series.

Mendoza started Game 3 and pitched six innings of a combined no-hitter with Ryan Fares to clinch the series. Mendoza boasts a team-best 0.89 ERA.

Marek, who’s 1-0 in the playoffs, is coming off a four-hit win over No. 10 Hallettsville in Game 1 of an area-round series at Nelson.

Perkins has made two relief appearances, striking out five batters in three innings.

Though all four pitchers have their own individual styles, the one constant in the Eagles’ playoff run has been their ability to work all corners of the plate.

The continued improvement of catcher Dustin Hamilton is a big reason they’ve been able to work up or down in the strike zone to fool batters.

“We’re not just stuck with one pitch,” Perkins said. “We can throw a curveball in the dirt if we have to and know that he’ll block it.”

Armed with a variety of pitches and solid defense behind them, Rogers’ pitchers have shut down offenses from New Waverly and Hallettsville that both averaged nearly 10 runs per game coming in.

Rogers’ playoff opponents have been held to an average of less than two runs a game.

The pitchers said that shutting down those offenses hasn’t been tough as long as they stick to the pitch called by assistant coach Nash Fares.

“If they tell us to throw a curveball to the outside corner, we’ve got to hit the spot,” Perkins said. “They know what they (opponents) can’t hit and what they do well. We just have to exploit their weaknesses."

rschneider@temple-telegram.com