New Phillie Taijuan Walker wants to go deeper in games, and has a plan for how to do it

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Taijuan Walker stepped onto the mound for Team Mexico in the World Baseball Classic against Britain on March 14 with a specific goal in mind.

Since the right-handed starter signed a four-year, $79 million contract with the Phillies in December, he’d been working with pitching coach Caleb Cotham on being more efficient. Entering this season, Walker, 30, set a goal for himself of 180 innings. The most he had ever thrown was 169⅔, for the Mariners in 2015.

To get there, Cotham and Walker decided he had to go deeper into games, and that meant bringing his pitch count down. They made some tweaks to his delivery, and refined some of his pitches, but they also paid close attention to his pitch selection. Walker has a six-pitch arsenal: four-seam fastball, splitter, slider, sinker, curveball, and cutter. Throwing the right pitches in the right spots would help him get through his outings faster.

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Walker put this to test against Britain. He knew hitters would be expecting him to use his splitter as his put-out pitch, so he snuck a few fastballs in there to keep them off-balance. It worked. Walker needed 15 pitches to get through his first inning, 17 in the second, 13 in the third, and 16 in the fourth and final inning. He had eight strikeouts and allowed one walk, no runs, and just one hit.

“I’m trying to limit the walks,” Walker said. “Usually when you walk a guy, it’s not just four pitches. It’s five, six, seven, eight pitches. So I’m trying to be more aggressive. I’m trying to attack guys more, and really trust my stuff.

“I feel like I can get to two strikes pretty quickly. It’s just about how quickly I can finish them, whether it’s a strikeout or getting some weak contact. If I can get to 0-2, 1-2 pretty quick, then I want to put them away as fast as possible.”

The diversity of Walker’s arsenal can help him with this. He plans to increase his splitter usage, because that’s his best pitch, but he also knows hitters, like the ones he faced against Britain, will be expecting that. Having five other pitches at his disposal should help him get quicker outs.

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Take his final Grapefruit League start on Monday against the Blue Jays as an example. It wasn’t Walker’s best outing — he pitched 2⅓ innings, allowing three walks with five strikeouts — but he used his full arsenal. In the first inning, he struck out Whit Merrifield on a slider. In the second, he struck out Brandon Belt on his cutter, and Santiago Espinal on his sinker.

Of his 44 pitches, only four were fastballs. Seven were splitters.

“Our way to efficiency isn’t just by getting weak contact,” Cotham said. “It’s also striking guys out efficiently, finishing guys efficiently. Because if it takes me six pitches to strike a guy out, three pitches to strike him out is better.

“I’ve seen him strike a guy out in 23 seconds. He can play that game. His pace is quick. He creates a feeling of a fast game. If he’s getting weak contact outs, and striking guys out, it will be a faster game.”

Walker’s workload is even more important now. The Phillies are down two starters after Andrew Painter suffered a right proximal UCL sprain and Ranger Suárez developed inflammation in his left elbow. To fill their spots, they have turned to Bailey Falter, who had just 117⅔ innings worth of big-league experience over his last two seasons, and reliever Matt Strahm, who has experience as a starter but hasn’t pitched out of the rotation with any regularity since 2019.

Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola are workhorses, but getting 180 innings from Walker would certainly help bridge the gap, as the Phillies wait for Suárez and Painter to return. It would also allow manager Rob Thomson to rely on his bullpen less in the first few months of the season.

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“I’ve always been a huge believer in the starters early in the year,” Walker said. “If we can go deeper into games, it saves the bullpen a lot for deeper in the season. So it’s always been my goal to go seven innings every time out. If we have three or four guys who can go seven innings every time out, then we don’t use the bullpen as much, and they’re more fresh toward the end of the year.

“I feel like the days of 200 innings are kind of over. There aren’t a lot of guys who can do that. It’s rare. I think 180 is kind of the mark now. So, I think it’s doable. It’s just little things I have to limit, like the big innings, the walks, stuff like that.”