Bryce Huff and Taijuan Walker, costly mistakes for the Eagles and Phillies, can’t start anymore
If they are, in fact, $123 million worth of miscalculations, then Howie Roseman and Dave Dombrowski need to admit it.
A price tag cannot dictate participation. Not on good teams. The Eagles are a good team. The Phillies are a very good team.
No matter how much money right-hander Taijuan Walker and defensive end Bryce Huff make, their teams cannot ask them to continue to do what they’ve asked them to do.
The Eagles cannot, in good conscience, have Huff act as an every-down defensive end, even though he has a $51.1 million contract. He’s an edge rusher; that’s all he was for the Jets, and that’s all he is for the Eagles, at least for the moment. Sort of. He’s so caught up in trying to set edges and shed blocks and tackle runners that he’s not an edge rusher right now, either.
He was the worst player on the field in their first two games, and the biggest reason the Eagles lost Monday night to Atlanta. It’s not his fault. It’s theirs. He can’t start against Alvin Kamara on Sunday in New Orleans. He just can’t. Let him enter on obvious passing downs. Use 36-year-old Brandon Graham for the dirty work.
Similarly, the Phillies cannot, in good conscience, have $72 million Walker throw another pitch for them.
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I said this for most of August, when Walker returned from injury. I wrote precisely this Aug. 28, after he’d proven himself unfixable. The next day, the Phillies sent Walker to the bullpen for three games; then, after one solid bullpen showing, they returned him to the rotation Thursday.
There was no good reason for this. Walker has been cooked for months. Maybe it’s physical. Maybe it’s mental. Maybe both. Doesn’t matter. I don’t blame him for struggling. I blame the Phillies for not recognizing his ineffectiveness.
I’ve advocated for Walker to be shelved since early August, after he missed seven weeks with the most devastating blister in the history of baseball. Since his return, Walker has a 9.31 ERA and has given up 12 home runs in eight appearances.
Since he was demoted, he has given up 12 earned runs in 11⅓ innings, including six home runs. On Thursday night his former team, the Mets, pounded him for eight runs, including four home runs. He recorded 10 outs.
This game mattered. A win would have clinched a playoff spot. Instead, on national TV — Fox had the game — the Phillies’ brain trust, led by manager Rob Thomson and president Dave Dombrowski, made it the sort of scheduled loss that Doc Rivers would have been proud of.
The Mets had won 15 of 19 games. The Phillies wasted a six-run night, on the road, against a team surging in the wild-card race. There is no scenario in which Walker can throw another pitch for the team that shares the best record in baseball.
“It just didn’t work out,” Thomson told reporters afterward. “My fault. I’ll wear it.”
He shouldn’t wear it again. Not this season.
The Phillies and Thomson are in a tough spot. Walker is under contract for another two seasons, at the same price tag, $18 million per, and they want to salvage some value, but it seems clear that Walker isn’t working out. Thomson made some glaring mistakes in the 2023 playoffs, but he knew better than to pitch Walker in the postseason last year.
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So, now, they have two options: Make him a wildly expensive bullpen piece or cut him loose. Unless Walker has a scintillating spring, the Phillies have to eat that money. Waive him. Nobody’s going to claim him.
He has the highest ERA of any pitcher with at least 80 innings this season, at 6.91. He’s given up 24 home runs. Only Marlins rookie Roddery Muñoz has given up as many homers (26) in similarly few innings (82⅔), and he was an emergency replacement in an injury-addled Miami rotation.
The Phillies have now lost their last 10 games when Walker starts. This is unconscionable for a club that plays as hard as the Phillies play. When he starts, the Phillies know they’re going to lose. There is only one more fifth-starter spot this season. He can’t make it. He certainly can’t be on the postseason roster this year.
Incredibly, for the moment, Walker is the second-biggest big-money disappointment in Philadelphia. Because Huff is the Walker of the Eagles.
After Huff broke out with 10 sacks in his fourth year with the Jets last season, Eagles GM Howie Roseman gambled that Huff would be the next Haason Reddick — an undersized pass-rusher with magnificent upside. Roseman anticipated Reddick’s holdout, so he signed Huff and traded Reddick (to the Jets, of all places), but Roseman’s gambit so far has proven flawed.
Like Reddick, Huff struggles to stop the run, only he’s much worse at it. This wears him down. It also confuses him; it paralyzes him as a pass rusher. As a result, caught in between, Huff has been rendered completely ineffective.
He ranks 63rd against the run among edge rushers with at least 40 snaps, according to Pro Football Focus, which is understandable.
He ranks 79th as a pass-rusher among edge rushers with at least 40 snaps, which is inexcusable.
“I need to find myself in the scheme,” he told reporters after Monday’s game.
No. The scheme needs to utilize his strengths. They knew this would be a problem.
In May, defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said: “Hopefully we can make him proficient enough to where he plays more, meaning his run play and on the occasion or two that we might want to drop him.”
In July, at training camp, Fangio said: “It will be a work in progress. Does he look like he can do it today? No. I do think eventually he will.”
Thursday, after Huff’s atrocious start to his Eagles career, Fangio said, “He’s still going to be the starter.”
Would that be the case if he wasn’t making more than $50 mil?
Look, sometimes the best personnel czars make mistakes. Dombrowski is among the best in Major League Baseball. Roseman is among the NFL’s best. Another championship for each, and they’ll both have slam-dunk Hall of Fame credentials; Dombrowski might already be there.
But they’ve each got a player on their team costing them their best chance to win. One has to be used properly. The other just can’t be used.
No matter how much they cost.
The Eagles play in Week 3 against the Saints in New Orleans. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from Caesars Superdome.