Christian Walker

The Diamondbacks have had a decent second half. Despite dropping five of their last six games, they carry a 26-23 record with a +31 run differential since the All-Star Break. It’s not enough to get them near the playoff picture, but they’ve shown some signs of life heading into the offseason.

An otherworldly stretch from ace Zac Gallen has played a key role in the team’s solid run, but they also rank fourth in the majors in runs scored in the second half. Young outfielders Daulton Varsho, Jake McCarthy and (in a more limited look) Corbin Carroll have been excellent, and they’ve gotten the continuation of what seems to be a late-career breakout season from first baseman Christian Walker.

Walker has popped 10 home runs and owns a .286/.348/.497 line since the All-Star Break, building off what was an already solid first half. While he only hit .204 through the year’s first few months, he connected on 22 longballs and walked at a robust 13.5% clip. His walks have come down lately, but he’s also trimmed his strikeouts and is now seeing much better results on balls in play. For the year, Walker owns a .235/.329/.474 line that’s a ways better than the .243/.312/.396 league average showing.

A former fourth-round pick of the Orioles, Walker developed into a fairly well-regarded prospect. He never got an extended look in Baltimore, and he eventually made his way around the waiver wire in Spring Training 2017. The South Carolina product wound up with the Diamondbacks after a nomadic few weeks, with Arizona finally succeeding in running him through outright waivers. After a year spent mostly in the minors, Walker made it back to the big leagues. He lost most of 2018 to injury but has played the past four seasons as the Snakes’ primary first baseman.

For much of that tenure, Walker has been a slightly above-average hitter. He connected on 29 longballs in 2019, but that came in the most homer-happy season in league history. His overall .259/.348/.476 line that year translated to a 111 wRC+ that indicates he was 11 points better than league average — solid, but not eye-popping production for a first baseman. Walker had similar results in the abbreviated 2020 season before stumbling to a subpar .244/.315/.382 showing through 445 plate appearances last year.

With rookie Seth Beer on the doorstep of the majors as a first base/DH option, it was fair to wonder whether the Diamondbacks would keep Walker around. Arizona’s front office maintained enough faith he’d right the ship to sign him to a $2.6MM arbitration contract, and he was back in the lineup as Torey Lovullo’s Opening Day first baseman. It was probably the 31-year-old’s last chance at everyday playing time, and he’s responded with the best season of his career.

Not only are Walker’s results better than ever when one accounts for the depressed offensive environment this year — his 121 wRC+ is a career high — he’s made some strides from a process perspective. He’s clearly set out to be more selective, swinging at only 43.7% of the pitches he’s seen after going after more than 48% of offerings in each of the past three seasons. That increased patience means bypassing some hittable pitches, of course, and Walker’s taking more called strikes than he ever has. Yet he’s also chasing pitcher’s pitches far less often, and it’s hard to argue with the results.

Walker is making contact on a career-best 77.6% of his swings, and he seems more comfortable working his way back into at-bats. He’s not expanding the strike zone as often as he had, even when pitchers are up in the count and/or working with two strikes. Walker’s making better swing decisions, and it’s manifesting both in a personal-low 18.4% strikeout rate and in the quality of contact he’s making when he does take the bat off his shoulders. After seeing his hard contact and barrel rates drop in the past two seasons, Walker is squaring the ball up with more consistency again, as he had back in 2019.

As a first baseman, Walker’s primary contributions are going to be in the batter’s box. Yet he’s also excelled on the other side of the ball, rating as MLB’s top defensive first baseman by a wide margin in terms of both Defensive Runs Saved and Statcast’s Outs Above Average. It’s hard to imagine he won’t secure his first Gold Glove Award a few weeks from now. He’s limited to the bottom of the defensive spectrum, but Walker has been one of the game’s better players at the position on both sides of the ball.

Whether Walker can sustain this kind of production over multiple seasons remains to be seen. There’s nothing in his underlying numbers to suggest he’s lucked his way towards the top of the first base leaderboards in 2022. If anything, batted ball estimators have been more bullish than his overall results, with Walker still sporting one of the league’s lowest batting averages on balls in play (.235). Nothing in this season’s production looks like a fluke, but he’ll need to prove he can maintain this kind of discerning approach every year. One can have “earned” excellent results for a few months and still not be able to continue playing at that level for multiple seasons. Walker probably needs another year like this before he cements himself among the five to ten best first basemen in the game.

Caveats aside, he’s performed as well as the Diamondbacks could have reasonably anticipated coming into the season. It’s now a no-brainer to tender him another arbitration contract, and the club can keep him around for two more years via that process. Arizona was open to trade offers on Walker at this past summer’s deadline, and they figure to receive a few more calls this winter after he’s doubled down with an excellent second half. General manager Mike Hazen and his staff presumably wouldn’t take him off the table entirely, but it’ll be harder for teams to pry Walker away now than it was just two months ago. Not only has the team taken some steps forward heading into 2023, their first baseman has cemented himself as an integral part of the lineup.

Image courtesy of USA Today Sports.

It’s been three years since Christian Walker rode the waiver carousel. A 2012 fourth-round pick of the Orioles, Walker’s chance of being a regular with the Baltimore organization likely went up in flames the moment owner Peter Angelos green-lighted the seven-year, $161MM deal that brought Chris Davis back to the club after he’d reached free agency. The Orioles still had a designated hitter spot, but a year later in the 2016-17 offseason, the Orioles re-signed Mark Trumbo to a three-year deal that only further cut into Walker’s opportunities. In Spring Training 2017, Walker was cut loose when the O’s acquired Richard Bleier from the Yankees.

From there, it was a whirlwind month for Walker — and likely one with a fair bit of frustration. After being blocked in Baltimore by Davis and Trumbo, Walker was surely hoping for a clearer path to the Majors. Instead, he landed in the National League, with no DH… behind Freddie Freeman. The Braves claimed Walker four days after his DFA in Baltimore but tried to sneak him through waivers themselves not two weeks later. Walker was again left to hope for a path to the Majors. Upon landing in Cincinnati on another claim, he was, of course, looking straight up at an in-his-prime Joey Votto. Three weeks later, Walker hit waivers again when the Reds tried to outright him at the end of camp. This time, he landed directly behind Paul Goldschmidt in Arizona.

The D-backs finally succeeded in passing him through waivers, though they selected him back to the big leagues later that year. For two seasons, Walker obliterated Triple-A opposition, slashing a combined .305/.372/.586 (142 wRC+) with 50 home runs, 59 doubles and 13 triples. And yet, his Major League counterpart matched him blow for blow in the big leagues; Goldschmidt posted a ridiculous .294/.396/.547 (144 wRC+) with 69 home runs, 69 doubles and eight triples. By the time the 2018 season concluded, Walker was out of minor league options while Goldschmidt entered the final season of his contract.

A trade of Goldschmidt seemed plausible but hardly a sure thing entering the winter of 2018-19. There was little hope of the D-backs re-signing him with Zack Greinke still on the books. Goldschmidt had already signed one team-friendly extension in his career and wasn’t likely to do so a second time. The D-backs explored deals involving both Goldschmidt and Greinke that winter, ultimately lining up with the Cardinals on a return of Luke Weaver, Carson Kelly, Andy Young and a Competitive Balance draft pick (Round B).

Even at that point, though, Walker wasn’t a lock to step into Goldschmidt’s shoes. The D-backs had re-signed Eduardo Escobar to a three-year deal, crowding the third base mix and perhaps pushing Jake Lamb across the diamond to first base. Lamb’s 2018 season was ruined by a shoulder injury, but he hit 59 home runs from 2016-17, batting a combined .248/.345/.498 along the way. A platoon looked to be the likeliest outcome for the right-handed-hitting Walker and the lefty-swinging Lamb, and that’s indeed how the club operated — until Lamb landed on the injured list once again on April 5 with a quadriceps injury that would sideline him into late June.

Prior to the 2019 season, Walker hadn’t started consecutive games in the Majors since Sept. 2014. With Goldschmidt out the door and Lamb on the shelf, however, the everyday opportunity he’d sought in the nearly five years since making his MLB debut was sitting right in front of him, and he seized it. Walker appeared inn 71 games while Lamb was on the IL — starting 66 of them — and hit .258/.333/.461 with 11 homers, 17 doubles, a triple, four steals and elite defense at first base. Even with Lamb back in the fold and playing on a $4.825MM salary, Walker had earned the trust of the organization and earned himself an everyday role.

By season’s end, the then-28-year-old Walker had compiled a .259/.348/.476 slash and 29 home runs. While his hitter-friendly home park and the juiced ball that prompted home run totals throughout the league to explode rendered that production perhaps a bit lighter than some might expect (112 wRC+, 111 OPS+), Walker complemented his output at the plate with quality baserunning and with some of the best glovework of any first baseman in the Majors. Walker’s 11 Defensive Runs Saved and 9 Outs Above Average trailed only Oakland’s Matt Olson for the MLB lead at his position. Walker’s 3.0 bWAR, in fact, topped the 2.4 mark of the franchise icon he’d replaced.

It’ll be important to see how he carries himself at the plate in the event of a course correction with regard to the composition of the baseball, but there’s little reason to doubt his ability. Walker (fittingly) drew a base on balls in 11.1 percent of his plate appearances and was among the game’s very best in terms of hard-hit rate (94th percentile), average exit velocity (85th percentile), xwOBA (81st percentile) and percentage of barreled balls (90th percentile). And even if those numbers take a step back, his superb glovework and excellent baserunning (relative to his positional peers) help to give Walker a relatively high floor.

All of that should be music to the ears of the D-backs, whose patience in hanging onto Walker was rewarded not only with a potential everyday heir to the first base slot — but one that can be controlled all the way through the 2024 campaign. Heading into the 2020 season — assuming there is one — there should be little doubt that Walker has a firm grip on the starting job that’s eluded him for his entire career. As insane as it would have sounded when Walker was acquired in 2017 and as improbable as it might’ve seemed even last spring, the D-backs look like they’ve successfully replaced Goldschmidt with a waiver claim.