Taijuan Walker returns from injury to struggling Phillies club, despite clear hold on first place in NL East

The Philadelphia Phillies got back veteran right-hander Taijuan Walker on Tuesday. He’d been on the injured list since June 22 with inflammation in his right index finger. Walker will start Tuesday’s home game against the Miami Marlins. In a corresponding move, the Phillies optioned right-hander Yunior Marte to Triple-A. 

This season, Walker, who turned 32 on Tuesday, has struggled with a 5.60 ERA (73 ERA+) and a 5.80 FIP across 10 starts. In 2023, Walker proved useful enough with a 98 ERA+ in 31 starts. The hope moving forward is that Walker will rediscover such adequacy and give the Phillies a viable presence at the back of the rotation. There’s hope for that now that he’s healthy and presumably clear of the inflammation and blister problems that were no doubt compromising Walker’s effectiveness. As Lochlahn March of the Philadelphia Inquirer notes, Walker has worked to alter his grip on the splitter, often a bedrock pitch for him, in the service of keeping those blister issues at bay and also improving his command of the offering. The Marlins, who have one of the worst offenses in the league, should theoretically provide a soft landing for Walker in his return. 

As for Walker’s Phillies, they continue to struggle. They’ve slipped to half a game behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the race for top overall seed in the National League, and they come into the two-game set with Miami having lost three games in a row. Looking further back, the Phillies have gone 4-6 in August and are 14-20 since the start of July. It’s been exactly a month since the Phillies achieved their high-water mark of 29 games over .500. 

The consoling knowledge for the Phillies is that the Atlanta Braves, preseason favorites in the NL East, have been even worse of late and thus haven’t been able to capitalize on Philly’s stumbles. Back on Aug. 1, they were five games ahead of the second-place Braves. Going into Tuesday’s slate – six losses in 10 games later – the Phillies are seven games ahead of the second-place Braves. With roughly a month and a half left in the regular season, SportsLine gives the Phillies a 93.1% chance of breaking Atlanta’s streak of six straight division titles. 

On another level, though, those recent Philly struggles may yet exact a price. The top two seeds in each league – meaning the two teams with the best records among the three division winners in each league – enjoy a first-round bye in the playoffs. That’s obviously a huge advantage, and the Phillies are in danger of squandering it. That’s because the Milwaukee Brewers, leaders of the NL Central, are just two games behind them. Even if the Phillies don’t get any heat from within the division, there’s Milwaukee to worry about. Finish behind the Brewers and Dodgers (assuming those two prevail in their respective divisions), and the Phillies will be forced to play a best-of–three Wild Card series. No World Series contender and division winner wants to invite such small-sample randomness into its postseason plans.

Let’s not oversell Walker’s return as some kind of pivot point with regard to these considerations, but getting solid innings from him at the four or five spot will help the Philly cause moving forward. The way they’ve been going lately, any and all help is welcome.