2025 stats: 68 G, 61.1 IP, 17 saves (24 chances), 4.11 ERA (3.63 xFIP), 8.8 K/9, 2.6 BB/9, +0.6 fWAR

Relievers are fungible. In some cases, they’re not and in other cases, we really hope they’re not, but since failure is the core of baseball, it’s unavoidable that most relief pitchers simply get chewed up and spit out. Ryan Walker’s 2025 season was certainly a warning that the end might be closer than he thinks and the Giants had hoped.

That seems a little hard to fathom for a guy who just turned 30. In the real world, he still has his whole life ahead of him. In the reality of Major League Baseball, he did very little to create a sustainable future… well, at least when it comes to pitching late in games as a setup arm or as the closer. If this seems a little too harsh for a player review, know that I have the “relievers are fungible” thought in my brain all the time. And then there’s this survey of what has been written about Ryan Walker over the years on this very site:

“Another success on the development front.”

“[T]here 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.“

Ryan Walker rebounded after a brutal year, but still looked more like a decent option than a weapon.

The trust ranking is based on the supposed role: he’s either the closer or the setup option. I think he did enough damage to his reputation this season that his role is now undefined. He did not end the season on a high note in any way and his cratered strikeout rate [just 15% in September] is beyond alarming.

It’s not quite a Camilo Dovalian fall from grace, but after emptying the bullpen via trades in 2025, a borderline elite Ryan Walker atop the 2026 bullpen would’ve brought a little more certainty to a group that’s largely comprised of dice rolls an lottery tickets.

Walker’s rollercoaster season contained a couple of silver linings.

He welcomed a second child into his family (congratulations!)His sinker velocity was a career-best 95.9 mph.His 2,696 rpm slider spin rate was the best of his career.

These are all the signs of a guy who should have had a big year and is setup to have a big 2026, but the results didn’t exactly hold up those under the hood advancements. That walk rate ticked up a decent amount, from 5.8% in 2024 to 6.8%. The plummeting strikeout rate doesn’t really suggest a closer in waiting and in an unfortunate development it dropped Walker down into the bottom 40 of relievers of strikeout rate (out of 100) who threw at least 60 innings. He wasn’t the only Giant down in this range, though:

97th – Tyler Rogers, 16.1 K%
93rd – Spencer Bivens, 17.8 K%
80th – Jose Butto, 20.4 K%
65th – Ryan Walker, 22.6 K%

And when you scan his results in Statcast, you get this fun little graphic:

So, with the stuff still there it would appear the issue is a matter of mechanics and spotting his pitches better. Ryan Walker has come into Spring Training believing that he’s ironed them out and wants the closer role. That’s very plausible, but the most probable explanation is that he threw 80 innings in 2024 and was simply burned out coming into 2025. He’s thrown the fifth-most innings of any reliever in Major League Baseball since making his debut (202.2 IP). FanGraphs removes the 14 games he’s opened (counting them as starts), but I’ve added them back in for this list. He beats Griffin Jax (who made 2 starts over the past 3 seasons) for 5th place by 1/3 of an inning.

It’s very easy to believe that his crossfire delivery adds a layer of complication when it comes to spotting location, and even physical recovery; but, we’ve seen how effective it can be when he’s physically flawless. Of course, flawless is a very tough state to attain and even harder to maintain, in Major League Baseball or anywhere else. The Giants will take an above average reliever in 2026, even if his 2025 was so inconsistent as to cast doubt on that possibility.

He went 0-3 with 2 blown saves in September. There’s the Giants’ playoff berth right there. During the June to August 60-game stretch where the Giants were absolutely putrid (21-39), he was much better in a non-closer role, but the instant he got pushed back into a high leverage situation he cost the team games (2 blown saves that were eventual losses and an extra inning loss). Flip two out of the three games and there’s the Giants’ playoff spot. Sure, the Giants’ offense had absolutely gone off-line over this stretch, but in two crucial spots of the season, when the Giants absolutely needed him, he couldn’t deliver. It probably shouldn’t have felt that big of a surprise considering how often he was used the year prior, but reader, I was surprised. It wasn’t just because he was bad for long stretches, but that he was especially bad for long stretched. That had everything to do with how great he was the year prior and even at times throughout 2025. .

Still, with Randy Rodriguez out for the year and Joel Peguero still a big enough question mark, the Giants don’t really have an arm like Ryan Walker who can be on the Opening Day roster. A dominant Spring Training would go along way from flipping a dream into an expectation, because if the Giants do have some version of the 2024 Ryan Walker, they suddenly become a very dangerous team.

Just don’t count on it.