The Philadelphia Phillies gave Taijuan Walker one last shot to figure things out. Rather than start the former New York Met on April 22, they set Walker up to skip the top of the Chicago Cubs' order with Kyle Backhus serving as an opener. It didn't matter. The 33-year-old came in after the first and logged four innings, giving up eight hits and five runs, four of them earned. His ERA zoomed up to 9.13.
With that, the Phillies had seen enough. They shockingly cut their losses and released Walker on Thursday morning shortly after his latest debacle. With his season line in Philadelphia complete, he subtracted 0.6 fWAR from the club in such a short amount of time.
The rest of the Phillies starters haven't had the best results, but the underlying metrics point to a much better performance and an incoming rebound.
Walker, excluded, obviously.
Taijuan Walker turned Phillies opponents into inner-circle Hall of Famers with his putrid performance
Everyone knows that Walker was bad. At a certain point, defining the level of ineptitude is an exercise in futility. What matters is he didn't do the job, and Philadelphia was worse off for having him on the roster.
But longtime baseball writer Jayson Stark put Walker's incompetence into context in a way you wouldn't believe. Stark is a wealth of information when it comes to baseball history and always has a flair for whimsy, and he ran the numbers to draw a comparison between the production of opposing hitters while facing Walker in 2026 and one of the game's icons.
Opposing hitters vs. Taijuan Walker this season:
— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) April 23, 2026
.353/.417/..657/1.074
Joe DiMaggio the year he hit in 56 games in a row:
.357/.440/.643/1.083 pic.twitter.com/gGfMn7nw0W
That's right. Walker gave up a 1.074 OPS, which was just a hair shy of Joe DiMaggio's 1.083 mark during his historic 56-game hit streak. Joltin' Joe is an inner-circle Hall of Famer, and the time period of his career we're comparing Walker's opponents to is a stretch when he achieved one of MLB's most unbreakable records. Absolutely insane.
Zack Wheeler's activation from the IL gives the Phillies an easy replacement, and even if the team needs to handle him with kid gloves to start while he's getting his sea legs after surgery to address thoracic outlet syndrome, he's guaranteed to be an improvement.
Walker set the bar low. Incredibly low. So low that you almost wonder if the Phillies would have been better off having a position player lobbing baseballs in place of Walker during his outings. While every Phillies fan couldn't wait for this day to come, it's still shocking to view Walker's atrocious performance through this kind of historical lens. At least it's all over now.
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