Shea Bridge Report: Walker and the Journalists
On the excellence of Taijuan Walker and Mets beat reporters
Good morning! On this Friday news roundup, we cover Taijuan Walker’s excellence so far this season, how he’s done it, and why people shouldn’t have assumed that he was washed up. We then turn to the media, and why the Mets’ beat’s coverage of the rat/raccoon saga was completely journalistically defensible and necessary.
Walker
You know how it always seems like everything the Mets do immediately turns ridiculous and terrible, and how Mets fans just can’t catch a break? Óliver Pérez? Luis Castillo? Jason Bay? Mets fans are always looking at other teams whose acquisitions have worked out well, and thinking to ourselves, “why can’t that ever happen to us?” Well, take a pause and soak in the moment, because it’s happening as we speak.
Taijuan Walker is 3-1 with a 2.20 E.R.A.; in three of his last four starts, he’s gone seven innings while allowing one run or less. Average velocity on all of his pitches is slightly up from last season; he’s also dramatically cut down on his fastball usage. Up until 2019, Walker’s fastball rate hovered around 60%. This season, it’s around 32%. To compensate, he’s amped up usage of two other pitches: the slider that he added last season (23%) and his sinker (21%). Hitters have actually hit pretty well against his sinker, slugging .407, but against his splitter, slider, and curve, they’re slugging .200, .188, and .000, respectively.
To be sure, Walker will regress. He won’t have a 2.20 E.R.A. at the end of the season, and you may quote me on that. He’s allowed a .221 BABIP so far this season, which will increase, especially since he allows a fairly average hard-hit rate; he’s also allowed a 2.8% home run per fly ball rate, which will likewise increase. But still: Walker can clearly pitch. He’s miles from Michael Wacha and Rick Porcello; he’s a genuine, quality pitcher who still has plenty left in the tank.
He’s also a cautionary tale to people who think they know better. I saw a lot of comments when the Mets signed Walker that sounded similar: “What do they see in him? His fundamentals don’t look like a good major league pitcher. He’s going to regress big time. He got lucky in a short season, but he’s really not that good.” To be clear, I’m not taking a victory lap just yet, because Walker will regress, and he’s not this good. But Walker did have a 2.70 E.R.A. over 11 starts in 2020, and since the start of last season, he has a 2.48 E.R.A. in 18 starts.
It’s easy to look at underlying numbers and say “this guy got lucky, and he’s going to regress in the future.” But it’s also important to look at outcomes. Walker has been a very solid back-end starter for more or less his entire career — albeit a career that’s been disrupted by injuries — and it never made sense to dismiss him as washed-up before he’d even thrown a pitch as a Met.
Media
At Metsmerized, I talked to Justin Toscano and Tim Healey, who cover the Mets for NorthJersey/The Record and Newsday, about the rat/raccoon saga.
My working theory is that people didn’t get mad at the media over their coverage of the story because of deeply-held principles of journalism; they got mad because they’re Mets fans. Logically speaking, there was never any reason that the media should have abandoned the story after the rat/raccoon press conference; if they’d done that, they wouldn’t have been media. They would have been Mets PR officers.
Both beat writers who I talked to said almost the same thing. Francisco Lindor, the Mets’ $341-million shortstop, potentially getting into a fight with his double play partner is a story. It just is. It’s so obviously a story that the media would be remiss not to cover it diligently.
Some people point to the rat/raccoon press conference as evidence that McNeil and Lindor had put the issue behind them, and that the writers should have done the same. But again: they’re reporters, not Mets PR officers. Just because two people have put a fight behind them doesn’t mean the fight is no longer a story.
Likewise, some people argued that this was a private issue, between McNeil and Lindor. But...come on. Whatever happened in the tunnel was almost captured on camera, and the reaction among the rest of the team certainly was. Then they came up with the rat/raccoon story, and gave the story a life of its own. A fight might not stay private if you’re a megastar and your colleagues are captured on camera running toward you to stop it.
Say there was a fight in the Yankees clubhouse. Or on the set of a major movie. Or in the oval office. In all those circumstances, Mets fans would rely on an independent media to tell the story of what had really happened. The same is true in this case: readers deserve a media that digs into things and gets the stories. Mets fans may not like the distraction, but that doesn’t change the media’s job description.