This Is Why the Phillies Didn’t Cut Taijuan Walker Last Winter

On Monday night in Cincinnati, Taijuan Walker scattered six hits and a walk over six innings. He allowed only a single earned run. He didn’t pick up a win; in fact, he was in line for the loss when manager Rob Thomson yanked him. But Walker pitched well enough to keep the Phillies within striking distance. Reds starter Andrew Abbott remained in the game into the eighth inning, where the Phillies finally touched him up. The NL East leaders went on to win the game 4-1.

I last wrote about Walker five months ago, at the very end of spring training. At the time, Walker was coming off a season in which he was the worst regular starting pitcher in baseball, and as frustrations around the team bubbled over following a disappointing playoff loss, the team’s overpaid and underperforming no. 6 starter was an easy target for public ire. Even in Philadelphia, it’s hard for an athlete to reach pariah status on quality of play alone, but Walker had managed it.

Through it all, I remained more optimistic than most about the veteran right-hander, which was not difficult. I also felt bad for the guy on a human level; it’s not easy to have tens of thousands of people boo you every time you screw up at work, no matter how much money you make.

More to the point, I saw no utility whatsoever in attempting to trade or cut Walker after the worst season of his (or, indeed, almost anyone’s) career. The Phillies would either need to eat $36 million in salary or trade a serious prospect in order to get someone else to do so; better to let him take the offseason to get right and re-evaluate things later in 2025. It’s not like he could pitch any worse.

Nevertheless, Monday’s outing was Walker’s 25th of the year, and his 14th start. In total, he’s posted a 3.39 ERA over 85 innings, which is a better ERA over a heavier workload than Spencer Strider or George Kirby this year, among others. According to Baseball Savant’s Year to Year Changes Leaderboard, Walker has had the biggest improvement of any pitcher in the league in xwOBA, and the seventh biggest in wOBA.

Even as a Walker optimist, I would never have guessed that he’d achieve those numbers, and still be starting for the Phillies in mid-August.

No matter how bad Walker was in 2024, the other reason to keep him around is that almost every team runs out of starting pitchers. The Phillies are better in this respect than most. In 2025, they’ve only used seven real starting pitchers; for the purposes of this article, I’m defining a “real” start as lasting at least three innings and 15 batters faced, to weed out the openers and bullpen games.

That’s abnormally low; only the Angels, unironically a bastion of stability in this case, have used fewer genuine starters. The Dodgers have used 14, while the Brewers and Astros have both used 12, and the Tigers, Mets, and Padres 11 each. That’s a lot!

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing; Walker got his first few turns in the rotation while lefty Ranger Suárez was on the IL. Aaron Nola has been hurt most of the year, and unplayable when healthy. Even the unflappable Zack Wheeler is having some issues of late and could end up on the IL himself at some point.

The Phillies are one of the better organizations in baseball when it comes to keeping their pitchers healthy, and they’ve invested immense resources when it comes to filling out their rotation depth. Consider what it took to acquire those seven starters, plus the as-yet-un-decanted Andrew Painter, who looms in Triple-A while waiting for his call: Three of their past 12 first-round picks; two prospects who would hit the global Top 100 after being traded; and just under $102 million in salary this year alone.

And still, instead of being run out of town on a rail, Walker is riding into the rotation on a white horse to save the day.

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but Walker has pitched well, and in great volume, when he looked cooked a year ago. It’s not perfect; his fastball velocity is still down a tick from 2023, and Walker is outperforming his xERA by two-thirds of a run and his FIP by a run and a half. But a decent back-end starter (albeit an expensive one) is a massive improvement from last year.

A lot of the difference comes from stuff I wrote about in March. Walker’s repertoire has more ingredients than your step dad’s secret chili recipe, and last year everything went kind of bland. The biggest problem, from my vantage point, was that his three fastballs and his splitter blended together into one highly hittable upper-80s mush. Even in Grapefruit League play, he was getting more separation on that side of his repertoire, and that’s continued throughout the regular season.

Let’s zoom in on the sinker and splitter as a pair; these were Walker’s two most-used pitches in 2023 and 2024, and even now they have pretty similar movement. In 2024, these were two of the worst pitches in all of baseball; as a tandem, Baseball Savant had them costing Walker 27 runs over the course of the season:

In general, life gets easier for a pitcher when his fastball/changeup combo gets hit for a .700 OPS, rather than a 1.100 OPS.

Walker’s best pitch this year is his cutter, which he’s throwing with more horizontal movement than in 2024. More to the point, he’s throwing it three times as often. Last year, he was throwing a sweeper that got good results in isolation, but its movement profile ran into the cutter’s, rendering the latter ineffective. This year, after returning to a traditional slider with more downward break, Walker is throwing his cutter almost a third of the time. It’s not a great pitch — Walker has allowed six home runs off his cutter and eight home runs off his other five pitches combined — but opponents are only hitting .212 against it.

Add in some marginal gains elsewhere — more strikes, fewer walks, more groundballs — and Walker is once again a usable major league starter. But as the Phillies trundle toward a fourth consecutive playoff berth, it’s not clear what role (if any) he’d be capable of playing in the postseason.

Let’s get as pessimistic as possible about the Phillies’ rotation without turning the next six weeks into a disaster movie. Say Wheeler’s barking shoulder — which he says he’s “not concerned” about — turns out to be serious. Let’s also say that Nola, who’s currently working through a minor league rehab assignment as he recovers from an ankle injury, gets back to the majors and continues to pitch, well, like Walker did in 2024.

That’d still leave the Phillies with a playoff rotation of Cristopher Sánchez, Suárez, Jesús Luzardo (all of whom are in the top 20 in the league in pitcher WAR, along with Wheeler), and probably Painter.

Back in 2023, Walker pitched better than he is pitching now, Luzardo was on the Marlins, and Sánchez was but an egg. And he was still an unused substitute during the postseason. In this act of his career, Walker’s strength has been volume, which is less valuable in October.

During the regular season, a major league team needs 1,400 innings, playing six times a week against variable competition, to make it through the season. In the playoffs, the competition is completely unforgiving, off days are numerous, and the path to the World Series can be traveled in not much more than 100 innings total. A pitch-to-contact guy with a 4.85 FIP is of highly limited utility in that scenario.

Given the Phillies’ surfeit of rotation options, Walker has already taken a few turns in the ‘pen; his 11 relief appearances this season more than doubled his previous career total. He even picked up his first career save back in May.

But while some pitchers can run the marathon of starting and still thrive in one-inning sprints, Walker isn’t really cut out for that. When pitching out of the bullpen, he throws harder and gets more swings and misses, but the gains are laughably small: His fastball velocity improves from 92.2 mph to 92.9 mph, and he goes from a 15.6% strikeout rate and 18.1% whiff rate to 22.9% and 18.7%, respectively.

Having strengthened the bullpen by signing David Robertson and trading for Jhoan Duran, the Phillies are already running out of relief spots, and things will get more crowded when Nola gets healthy and Painter gets called up.

So this happy moment for Walker will probably end up being bittersweet, which is a shame. He’s bounced back from that dreadful 2024 campaign. He’s remade himself, played well, and had a not-insignificant hand in putting the Phillies on the path to defend their division title. And yet the overwhelming likelihood is that he’ll spend yet another October not on the mound, but in sneakers and a windbreaker.