Player review: Ryan Walker

Praise him.

2024 overall stats: 76 G, 80 IP, 1.91 ERA, 2.52 FIP, 0.85 WHIP, 32.1 K%, 5.8 BB%,

as closer (post Aug. 10th): 19.2 IP, 0.92 ERA, 1.90 FIP, 0.76 WHIP, 37.3 K%, 6.7 BB%

Everything about Ryan Walker is twisted. When he pitches, he spins. A barber shop pole of a delivery starting with his back to the batter, a coy look over his left shoulder as he hinges at the hip and his entire upper body gets yanked around by the wide wandering swing of his front leg. Even the bill of his cap is worn off-center, directed at a dubious point up the foul line.

Nothing straight — a simple logic at the core of Walker’s approach. The Emily Dickinson school of pitching: throw the ball, but throw it slant. And it’s nothing new. Gone are the days in which pitchers were expected to be mere waiters serving the ball up on a platter for the hitter to pick and peruse and pounce. Since Candy Cummings sold his soul to the devil and bewitched the ball to bend in mid-air, the life of a hitter has been one of overall misery punctuated by brief peaks of happiness.

For Walker, the answer to the question How do I get the ball to move? is found in his mechanics. In this video released last September, he talks about leaning more and more into his lower half and embracing the cross over motion. Following the logic of that delivery led to a breakthrough in understanding: he is not a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate parts sewn together, but a cohesive whole. A ribbon of connected muscle and tissue runs from his right-hand down to his left foot. As much as he wanted to manipulate the ball with his hand and wrist, the break he gets comes from his lower half, of following his landing leg on its roundabout journey towards home.

The horizontal break on Walker’s slider, measuring out to be more than a foot of glove-slide run (on average), proved to be the most drastic in the Majors last season.

Pitching coach J.P. Martinez describes the movement as less of a break that loops out of his hand, but a late snap — which is why it pairs so well with his sinker. The two mimic each other well, tunneling well past a hitter’s comfortable swing decision point before they start to differentiate themselves by their varying velocities and directions. In terms of the up-and-down, Walker’s sinker drops more than the league average while the slider drops less. The breaking ball’s 14.9 inches of horizontal break to the glove side is mirrored almost perfectly with the sinker’s 15.1 inches of horizontal break to the righty’s arm side. Both pitches teased the two-feet-of-break mark in their extremes — a divergence comparable to the wingspan of a red-tailed hawk.

Peek this slider to Eugenio Suarez. Out of the hand, the pitch appears directed at the center of the plate, and it arrives an arm’s length into the opposite batter’s box.

Here Zack Gelof’s whole body flinches at the snap of Walker’s sinker back over the plate. That kind of reaction to a fastball down Main Street? How ?Why? Because moments ago that pitch was a slider, breaking away, an easy take for Gelof to lean-in and watch fall away…

This kind of either/or, one or the other pitch mix is intoxicating to watch, and I imagine, a nightmare to hit against. The biggest weapon you have as a hitter are the odds, your bat and a coin. A 50/50 chance of guessing the right pitch — but those chances dwindle fast when you factor in the hitter’s ability to recognize the pitch even when they’ve guessed it, and their ability to actually hit it. Then there’s that seed of doubt to contend with, to hesitate would be to fail. The wreckage Walker leaves in his wake: flailing hacks, broken down swings, buckled knees. It’s all reminiscent of one of the finest moments in Giants history. Sure Miguel Cabrera will probably be a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I like to think that when he closes his eyes at night he still sees Sergio Romo’s slider morph impossibly mid-flight into that iconic two-seamer bending back towards the plate.

But Walker isn’t just the Tasmanian Devil Looney Tune relying on funk and deception and beard and over-the-top “Stuff.” That certainly comes into play, but Walker’s success is ground in his control, especially with his sinker. He can fully embrace the cross-over mechanics, the “nothing straight” mentality, because he can paint with his sinker. The ability to locate the fastball is ultimately what established Walker as the Giants closer on August 10th, and what banished Camilo Doval from the 9th inning into the wilderness of the Central Valley.

There is perhaps no better example of Walker’s command in 2024 as when he danced on the edge of catastrophe against the A’s in Oakland on August 18th.

Tasked with preserving a two-run lead in the 10th after already pitching the 9th, he found himself in a dicey no-out situation after an error, walk and single loaded the bases. It was clear after the two innings of work that the stress and workload of the outing was wearing on Walker. The slider had a mind of its own with odd, inconsistent shapes. He got a quick (and lucky) 0-2 on lefty JJ Bleday after he ripped an inside slider into the right field seats. Clearly, the breaking ball was no longer an option — but even with one wing, Walker stayed afloat thanks to his command. He froze Bleday by leaking two sinkers off the outside of the plate to set-up the backdoor break inside. It didn’t matter that Bleday was seeing Walker well, it didn’t matter that he knew a sinker was coming or that he was getting off good swings — to offer at that sinker, a pitch somehow thrown by the shortstop, one beelined for the letters across his chest — would’ve been impossible.

The location of Walker’s 1-1 sinker to the righty Miguel Andújar was just as sublime.

Served up on a knife’s edge, a surgical strike with the force of a machete’s hack that cut through the tangle of the inning and cleared a path forward. A fastball snaking from the opposite batter’s box just enough to scrape off a stitch on the outside corner of the plate — that from a hitter’s perspective, is a pitch-non-grata. Nothing productive could ever be done with an offering at that location, but since that pitch is suddenly a possibility, a distant region of the plate he doesn’t want to cover becomes Andújar’s responsibility. The strike zone now a canyon with home plate and the right-hand batter’s box on conveyor belts moving in opposite directions. The possibility of drive or barrel or discipline are long gone — Andújar is just desperate for contact, the tiniest sliver of wood grain fraying the slightest seam, and is now helplessly exposed to the ridiculous sweep of the slider.

Once that 1-1 sinker was called — rightfully — a strike, the game was lost. The mound became a black hole of energy sucking the energy of the Coliseum away from the plate. Walker was in control, and at that point with two outs recorded, Shea Langeliers’s presence in the box for the final three pitches of the game felt largely ceremonial.

The scenario there in Oakland brings me further back to a similar conundrum that Doval faced on May 24th against the Mets. It’s a game that I can’t help but root around in this winter (and one that I certainly don’t mind returning to). Its relevance here is for comparison: Doval’s mound presence compared to Walker’s two months later. Camilo got credit for the save in the 8-7 win, he was on duty when the tying run was stranded, achieving the same end as Walker in Oakland…with some key differences in the details. By the time Doval induced the third out, he was a hollow arm. He couldn’t locate his slider, and his cutter was delivered on the wings of a prayer. By that final 3-2 cutter to Vientos, Doval had been reduced to that primitive role as server with no power to play with type or location, the moment he released the baseball it was just please please please be over the plate turning quickly into please please Chappy get to that ball and oh god please please Wade pick it.

Doval did not close out that game in New York; Walker absolutely did in Oakland. After securing the save, the typically stoic Walker burst with unbridled emotion, buzzed with electricity that powered him over his next three outings. His next game he struck out Chicago’s side on 11 flawless pitches. In Seattle, he struck out five of the six batters he faced. Walker arguably still hasn’t relented that power. Of the 14 games after his appearance in Oakland, 13 were scoreless. Across those 15.2 innings pitched, Walker struck out 20 and walked only two, his only blemish wrought by the bat of Anthony Santander, a fly ball that just kept carrying…

As Sean pointed out in his Camilo Doval review, the closer role is infamously untenable. 2024 started with a discussion about a multi-year extension for Doval and ended with him out of a job.

That being said, there are plenty of reasons to feel confident in Ryan Walker as the San Francisco Giants closer in 2025. Command is a big one. He nearly halved his BB% from 9.1% to 5.8%. Not only does Walker live around the strike zone (53.4% Zone%, MLB avg. 48.7%), but he’s in there early on in counts (63.8% 1st pitch strike%, MLB avg. 61%). Nor is Walker’s effectiveness overly reliant on generating whiff or chase. While he’s above league average in both, what is most compelling is his ability to steal strikes with his unique and uncomfortable mechanics and effective tunneling. Of pitches thrown over the plate in 2024, only 60.7% of them were swung at, which was the lowest rate in the Majors (min. 300 PA). When swings were swung and contact was made, the extreme motion on his sinker and slider proved tough to barrel (6% Barrel%) while his 30.2% Hard-Hit rate ranked in the 98th percentile.

Be weary of soothsayers peddling guarantees…but I like Walker’s odds in 2025.