Struggling Giants Reliever Not as Awful as His Numbers Suggest

The San Francisco Giants' bullpen has a real argument as the single best unit in all of baseball. It's deep, with a blend of young ascending players and experienced veterans that gives manager Bob Melvin the ability to get strikeouts, force soft contact, or anything in between.

It's an elite unit. Is it perfect? Maybe close, but no.

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Ryan Walker entered the season as one of the faces to the Giants' bullpen before anyone know how consistently dominant of a unit it would be. He finished 2024 with a 1.91 ERA and a 0.85 WHIP with 99 strikeouts in 80 innings of work.

But this year has been different. Walker, 29, has a 4.64 ERA and a 1.15 WHIP in 2025. He gave up two runs in San Francisco's 5-2 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Sunday. It does not look great on the surface. But when diving deeper, it may not be as bad as one might think.

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Accord to Baseball Savant, many of Walker's metrics are the same as last season: really, really good. But there's a noticbable difference in his strike metrics. His K% went from the 94th percentile in 2024 to the 49th, while his Whiff% went from the 74th percentile last year to the 14th percentile this year.

That's not even a regression, that's two different pitchers.

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But when looking at Walker's whole season, there's a positive trend. He ballooned his ERA early in the season in a two-game span, allowing six runs in 0.2 innings to take his ERA from 1.13 to 7.27. But as a whole, it's gone down slowly over the season. He had a 3.72 ERA in May and a 2.92 ERA in June.

Maybe Walker's numbers are inflated by a couple of very atrocious starts as opposed to a top-to-bottom plummet like the numbers would make him appear.

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Thankfully, the rest of the bullpen is holding up, so he has a lot of breathing room to get himself back into shape.

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