Taijuan Walker should lose his starting spot with the Phillies to Spencer Turnbull

Taijuan Walker has a 5.73 ERA in his seven starts, which ranks 129th among the 143 starters in the majors with at least 32 innings pitched.

Spencer Turnbull ranks 19th with a 1.67 ERA. That’s 110 spots higher.

When Walker got hurt in spring training, Turnbull, a low-cost, low-risk gamble, replaced Walker, a high-priced, high-profile disappointment. Turnbull pitched magnificently. Still, he lost his starting spot when Walker returned from a sore shoulder in May. Turnbull deserves to get it back.

This is a non-argument. This is a ridiculous discussion.

The Phillies last year signed Walker to a four-year, $72 million contract that pays him $18 million per season. It makes him the 20th highest-paid starting pitcher. Has he ever been worth $18 million? No. Should he be starting for the Phillies? With Turnbull available, absolutely not.

Baseball is a meritocracy, and $18 million is not merit. It’s a mistake.

Walker was signed to eat innings as a back-end starter for 2023. After that season, Aaron Nola was scheduled to become a free agent. If Walker pitched better than his profile — if he became a No. 2 starter for a top-flight team with an ace like Zack Wheeler — then he’d be a bargain replacement for Nola. If Walker pitched to his profile, he’d be a moderately overpaid veteran No. 3 or No. 4 starter. If he just showed up, he’d be an overpaid No. 5, which is what he’s been for most of his tenure in Philadelphia.

As a matter of fact, in this moment, he’s the sixth-best starter on a staff of that:

A) Re-signed Nola; B) Saw Ranger Suárez pitch for a big-time extension; C) Saw Cristopher Sánchez outpitch expectations last season and this; and D) Saw Turnbull, an absolute wild card, pitch out of his mind as Walker’s injury replacement. After going 12-27 with a 4.47 ERA in the last five seasons, disrupted by both COVID-19 and injury, Turnbull went 2-0 with a 1.67 ERA in his six April starts.

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More than anything else, it has been Turnbull’s unforeseeable hot start that has Phillies fans clawing their eyes out in light of Walker’s rocky return. Except Walker’s rocky return isn’t an exception.

It’s the rule.

In his last 12 starts of 2021 with the Mets, Walker went 0-8 with a 6.47 ERA. He gave up 20 home runs. He finished the year with a 4.47 ERA. In his last 11 starts in 2022 with the Mets, Walker went 3-3 with a 4.83 ERA. He gave up eight home runs. He finished with a 3.49 ERA.

In his first 12 starts of 2023 with the Phillies, Walker went 4-3 with a 5.65 ERA. He gave up 10 home runs. He finished with a 4.38 ERA. Walker now is 3-1 with that 5.73 ERA in seven starts. He’s given up eight home runs.

He’s 18-7 in 38 starts as a Phillie, and while I’m a pretty big fan of the “Win” stat for pitchers, he’s currently the best living argument against it. The Phillies win not because of his effectiveness, they win despite his best efforts.

That isn’t true in every start. He’s been somewhere between “good” and “very good” in about half of his starts with the Phillies. In today’s skewed pitching market that would be acceptable, especially since he plays for the best team in baseball, whose magnificent offense can forgive all sorts of sins — sins like allowing more than five earned runs in the first three innings, which he’s done both this year and last.

It’s not as if Walker has streaks of dominance, then falls into funks. He’s had long streaks of poor pitching interrupted by occasional instances of mediocrity.

Last season, there was no Plan B. This season, there is Turnbull.

In an era of hyper-valuation of load management, the Phillies like to say they’re protecting Turnbull. He hasn’t thrown more than 56⅔ innings in a season since 2019, when, in his first full big-league season, he threw 148⅓ innings (and led baseball with 17 losses for a 47-114 Detroit Tigers team).

Well, John Smoltz averaged 71 innings when he moved to the bullpen from 2001-04 — and then, at the age of 38, returned to starting, and averaged 222 innings the next three seasons.

Manage that load.

What’s more … why should the Phillies care if Turnbull has a dead arm after, say, 120 innings? He’s not a prospect. He’s a random veteran on a one-year deal. He’s made less than $8 million in the majors, and as long as he’s healthy in November, he’s going to get vastly overpaid next year by some other team. The Phillies might get 120 really good starter innings they didn’t think they’d get.

He’s making $2 million. If he keeps his ERA under 3.00 through 120 starter innings, that would be the best free-agent money the Phillies have spent in a long time, and brother, they’ve spent a lot of free-agent money lately.

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Phillies players shouldn’t be punished because, in Walker, team president Dave Dombrowski made a rare bad move. They should be rewarded because, in Turnbull, Dombrowski made another brilliant signing.

Look, you can contort the logic any way you’d like. Walker is paid the 20th-highest amount of money, so he should be somewhere in the top 40 of starters, at least. He can’t sniff the top 100.

This isn’t personal.

Walker’s a quirky guy, but he’s a decent guy. He tries hard, and he’s a good enough teammate, but if he continues to underperform after Turnbull helped carry the club for a month, it could breed the disease of resentment in an astoundingly healthy clubhouse.

To his credit, Turnbull has bitten his lip and excelled in his bullpen role. The Phillies have won every game in which he appeared in relief except one, in which he pitched a scoreless sixth inning. His only sketchy relief appearance was three innings of mop-up work.

Walker has been given every chance to earn his spot back. He has done the opposite.

To be clear: Nothing in his recent past earned him the right to earn his spot back.

Not only did he pitch himself out of consideration for even one postseason inning, he ripped the club on Twitter/X after the playoffs ended. Just hours after the Phillies lost Game 7 of the NLCS, Walker “liked” tweets critical of manager Rob Thomson, and posted on his own account, “Disrespect is at an all-time high #nextyear.”

Well, #nextyear has arrived. Walker has not shown up.

And Turnbull has shown out.