Seattle Mariners Taijuan Walker dominating offenses in 2016
The Seattle Mariners’ Taijuan Walker has turned into a different pitcher after re-discovering one of pitches.
Young pitchers are making a lot of news early this season. Noah Syndergaard of the New York Mets is the early leader for the National League Cy Young Award and the Philadelphia Phillies’ Vincent Velasquez is putting up impressive numbers for a surprisingly competitive team.
Last night he pitched against Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer, going six innings and allowing three earned runs on five hits and four strikeouts in a 4-3 win. While his well-rounded pitching repertoire deserves notice, slightly less attention has been paid to Seattle Mariners starter Taijuan Walker.
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Walker is pitching like the break-out talent the Mariners front office and scouts knew he could be. Multiple baseball publications ranked him as a top-20 prospect as far back as 2012, but growing pains and injury pains kept him out of the majors for any extended period of time.
The Mariners got their chance to see him pitch a full season in 2015. He had an up-and-down year, finishing with a 4.56 earned run average, 4.07 fielding independent pitching and a 3.93 strikeout-to-walk ratio.
Walker has been downright revelatory through four starts in 2016. Monday he struck out 11 batters, which tied a career high, in seven innings of work and allowed just one run on six hits and one walk against the hapless Houston Astros. With 25 innings under his belt this season, Walker has a 1.44 ERA and 2.08 FIP.
The good people of at Brooks Baseball have enough charts and data to play with to keep the nerdiest baseball writer occupied for hours—Seriously,
some time. A look at their data on Walker shows that Walker’s splitter has become a very effective pitch, and he’s throwing it at a career-high rate (22.71 percent of his pitches). In 2015 he used his splitter less (18.37%) and his fastball more: his 52.5% fastball usage in 2016 is the lowest of his career.
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The splitter, which some would call a changeup, has turned Walker into a groundball machine. Entering play Tuesday he was 15th in the majors in groundball rate (55.1%) according to FanGraphs, which is up from 38.6 percent in 2015. Hitters are hitting .070 against the splangeup, down from .300 last season.
The use of the pitch has allowed Walker to pitch to contact, which has produced some interesting results. Hitters are making contact on 82.2 percent of their swings, up from 78.9 percent in 2015, which makes sense. Interestingly, even though Walker seems to be pitching to contact, his strikeout rate has gone up (to 9.00 from 1.08) compared to last season. That coupled with his walk rate going down (to 1.08 from 2.12) has added a swing-and-miss facet to his game. Here are the whiff percentages of Walker’s pitches over the past two seasons:
Next: What has gone wrong in Houston?
It’s early and the sample is small, but it appears as though Walker has turned his splitter—many of the pitches in the video above described as change ups may in fact be splitters—into a double-edged sword to use against hitters; if they make contact, it’s a groundout; if they don’t, it’s a strikeout.