Today’s Review features a follow-up observation of Jordan Walker, and his career turbulence and disappointment, and what could have been done differently with the benefit of hindsight. And having the chance to go into the retrospective mode tends to make us a lot smarter, right?
Before I begin, let me say this: There isn’t a perfect, by-the-book process for developing young hitters, or a web site that provides 100 percent guaranteed methods for leading a lost hitter out of the shakehole when he falls into slumps and despair.
Still, a couple of things about J. Walker make me wonder. And I’m going to focus on those two things: did the Cardinals bring Walker to the majors too soon? Did the Cardinals make a mistake by reworking Walker’s swing to improve his power capability?
Walker started two of the three games against the A’s and went 0 for 7 with three strikeouts. Since Aug. 11, Walker is 7 for 58 (.121) with a 37 percent strikeout rate. For the season, among MLB hitters that have a minimum 300 plate appearances, Walker’s wRC+ translates into 37 percent below league average offensively. That makes him 243rd among 249 hitters. This, of course, is very troubling. So I want to reexamine a couple of questions.
1. Were the Cardinals wrong to bring Walker to the majors so soon?
Walker was drafted out of high school in June of 2020, and the Cardinals gave him a $2.9 million signing bonus to pivot from his commitment to play college ball for Duke.
Walker’s minor-league apprenticeship consisted of only 201 games – plus another 21 if you want to include his 2022 stint in the Arizona Fall League.
Walker's most extensive assignment was 119 games at Double A Springfield in ‘22. And that was it, his pro-baseball education. Not a day in Triple A Memphis before the start of the 2023 campaign.
Next stop: an express ride to St. Louis for an accelerated entry into Major League Baseball. Walker was 20 years old when the Cardinals made the decision to give him a spot on the opening-day roster and start him in right field.
Problem was, the Cardinals didn’t give Walker enough time in the minors to learn how to play the new position. The big man, a third baseman, played only 25 games at his new post in RF near the end of the 2022 season for Springfield, then logged 12 more games in right during his participation in the Arizona Fall League.
In all, he had only 295 total innings of minor-league prep to learn right field, a place he’d never been before.
What were the Cardinals thinking? They plopped Walker into an unfamiliar and uncomfortable place without giving him additional training at Triple A.
Don’t forget, by this point, the Cardinals’ minor-league operation was short on coaches and instructors and Walker didn’t have the assistance of a full-time instructor working to get him ready for his new adventure in right field.
And from that awkward beginning, Walker made the direct jump from Double A ball to the majors. And the poor dude – sadly and predictably – was brutal in right field. I felt bad for him. I still do. Please ignore this nonsense about how Walker has improved defensively. That was true earlier in the season, but the quality of his defense eroded over time.
Based on defensive runs saved, Walker is this team’s worst defender – at any position – with minus 9 in DRS. And he’s also near the bottom with a minus 3 in Outs Above Average. Statcast puts Walker in the bottom 15 percent of MLB defenders in Fielding Run Value.
Walker is still wandering around out there.
Well, at least he can hit.
Until he couldn’t.
I remember 2023 Cardinals spring training. Walker was the talk of camp Jupiter. The buzz was electric. Fans were excited. The Cardinals front office was excited. National media – and local media – oh, definitely excited. The “kid” was a sensation. But during the final two weeks of the exhibition-game schedule, Walker began pounding ground balls.
Over and over again. Ground ball after ground ball. On my radio show, I questioned the wisdom of bringing Walker to the majors so soon, simply because of the ground-ball outbreak that caused him to go 4 for 33 (.121) over his last 10 exhibition games.
In his first 20 games in the majors Walker had a startlingly high 60 percent ground ball rate. And though Walker batted .274 by muscling hard-hit grounders past infielders over that time, he produced 15 singles and only four extra-base hits.
That said, given his positive showing early in his rookie excursion, my concerns over his late-camp slump were probably overstated …
Or maybe not?
At that point in late April, the Cardinals made the decision to send Walker to Triple A Memphis to modify his swing, and eventually that paid off. (At least for a while.) Walker returned to the big club later in the 2023 season and had an encouraging finish.
I’ll return to this topic later.
First, I want to talk about two high school hitters drafted early by the Cardinals in back-to-back years.
Walker, an Atlanta-area native, was taken with the 21st overall pick in 2020. A year later, the Cardinals used the 54th overall selection to choose Massachusetts high schooler Joshua Baez. Attracted to his raw power and speed, the Cards handed Baez a $2.25 million bonus.
Walker was put on a fast lane to the majors. With Baez, the Cardinals decided to take their time, take it slow, and let him grow and develop at his own pace. They vowed to be patient with Baez, and they were. They used a more traditional approach instead of pushing him fast through the minors.
Baez struggled terribly in 2021, made some progress in 2022, lost momentum with a 34 percent strikeout rate in 2023, and lost more ground with a 36 percent strikeout rate in 2024.
By then, Baez was scratched from various “top prospects” lists of developing Baby Birds. St. Louis minor leaguers by independent talent evaluators. There was a question: would Baez find a way? Can he get back on track and gain traction? Or was he destined to become another early-round bust?
The answer: Baez is having a breakout season in 2025. He started at High A Peoria, was promoted to Double A Springfield, and continues to improve after moving up to a more difficult league for young players. Baez is back on the organizational top prospect list, with FanGraphs listing him at No. 15 among 41 cited players.
“It’s been four years since this house of a man was plucked out of suburban Boston for a $2.25 million bonus,” FanGraphs wrote in early July. “A raw power project who used to be a two-way player and a cold weather kid to boot, Baez needed a long runway to show progress, but things appear to be clicking after years of injuries and excessive whiffs.”
In 71 games for Springfield so far this season, Baez has a .365 on-base percentage, and .490 slugging percentage. Combing his stats from Peoria and Springfield, Baez has struck for 17 homers, 13 doubles, plated 71 RBIs, and stolen 50 bases this year. His plate discipline is outstanding – with matching strikeout and walk rates of 12 percent.
The Cardinals gave Baez a chance to develop and battle through the hard times without getting much outside attention. The slower place was good for Baez because it gave him an opportunity to learn and adapt, learn and adapt. Baez still has challenges to defeat, but he’ll be another step closer to St. Louis in 2026. Baez – 6-3 and 230 pounds – still has work to do, but in 2025 he’s displayed the talent that motivated the Cardinals to draft him so early.
“Despite his massive frame, Baez still moonlights in center field a little, but he’s corner-bound based on his size alone, with ball-tracking that still needs polish,” FanGraphs wrote. “A former high school pitcher who touched the upper 90s, Baez has more than enough arm for right field, but he’s likely to trend toward below-average range as he continues to fill out. This looks like a high-order platoon bat at present, with enough juice to be a corner regular if Baez keeps finding ways to get to his power.”
Jordan Walker’s fast transport to the major leagues worked against him – in the field, and in the batter’s box.
Sure, he had good rookie-season numbers in his rookie MLB season – 16 homers, a .345 on-base percentage and a .445 slug – but big-league pitchers eventually found his weaknesses. And they adjusted to exploit Walker’s flaws by enticing him to chase pitches out of the strike zone. His plate discipline crashed, and Walker hasn’t been able to recover.
That’s what I wonder about: Baez is able to get ready for the majors on a schedule that worked best for him. He took a more typical route to the big leagues.
The Cardinals were so fired up by Walker that he never had that more gradual developmental time to work on his swing. To learn how to use his strength with an uppercut punch that unlocked his pull-side power.
Walker had to work at this out in the open, on the big-league stage, and the scrutiny is more intense than anything Baez had had to reckon with.
I guess we’ll never know how this would have worked out had the Cardinals decided to proceed with more caution instead of going on a mad dash with the hope of instant and lasting success. The Cards saw Walker as their next franchise-piece star, and that desire probably overtook their common sense.
2. Were the Cardinals wrong to instruct Walker to adjust his swing in order to get the ball off the ground and into the sky?
I’ve thought a lot about this, and I don’t think they were wrong. During his stay in Triple-A as a rookie, Walker made some mechanical adjustments to elevate the ball instead of ripping grounders on the dirt and the grass. And the tweaks did lead him to more positive results.
During his final two months with the Cardinals in 2023, Walker lowered his ground-ball rate to 39.7 percent – a huge drop from earlier in the season.
Also:
— Walker batted .426 when he cocked his swing to the pull side. He smoked five home runs and four doubles and slugged .778 in 54 at-bats that ended with a pull shot.
— In his 51 games for the Cardinals during those final two months of 2023, Walker hit .682 with a 1.500 slugging percentage when he pulled a pitch for a fly ball or line drive … and more than half of his hits went for extra bases.
In other words, Jordan was doing exactly what the Cardinals instructed him to do. Though it took a long stay at Memphis, Walker raised the ball – and his stats in the final weeks of ‘23. The results were excellent.
That’s why I don’t understand the folks who still insist the Cardinals messed up Walker by getting him to propel more pitches into the horizon instead of banging them on the ground.
A man of Walker’s size, strength and bat speed shouldn’t settle for being a singles hitter. And by the way: over the final two months of the 2023 season, had 17 hits on ground balls and batted .304. Granted, 16 of the hits were singles (the other, a double) but the point is, Walker was able to do both things well.
When Walker had a pitch to drive in the air, he went after it. When Walker connected on a heavy sinker that produced ground balls, he had the strength to drill it past the infielders. So this was your basic “best of both worlds” combination and I have absolutely no idea why people still bitch about this. It makes no sense.
OK, so you may be asking … then if the swing modification was such a swell idea, then why has Jordan turned into one of the worst hitters in the majors over the last two seasons?
Good question.
Easy answer.
Almost all of JW’s failures are the result of his flat-out hideous plate discipline.
Over the last two seasons (combined), pitchers have attacked Walker with the comfort of knowing that he will (a) be overly aggressive and swing at too many pitches, (b) swing at many, many pitches that are out of the strike zone, and (c) chase offspeed pitches and breaking balls as if he’s being pulled in down by some magnetic field.
Over the last two years Walker has an 18.7 percent whiff-swing rate when he pursues a pitch in the strike zone … seriously, that’s good! … but he has a 60.5 percent whiff-swing rate when he lunges at pitches out of the strike zone.
When Walker chases fastballs out of the zone his whiff-swing rate is 40 percent. It’s 65% when he hacks at offspeed offerings thrown away from the zone. And there’s his whiff-swing rate of 77.5 percent on breaking balls that spin away from the plate and drop to his ankles.
Another statistical nugget: over the last two seasons, when Jordan connects on a pitch in the strike zone and puts the ball in fair territory, his batting average is .260 and he has 10 homers and 19 doubles.
But when Walker chases a pitch out of the strike zone and connects, he is 12 for 128 (.094) with a .109 slugging percentage.
I ask again: Did the Cardinals make a mistake to adjust Walker’s swing? And my answer is the same. This debate is outdated because the answers are perfectly and undeniably clear.
After those adjustments were made to his setup and swing (as advised), Walker’s power hitting kicked in and the numbers were fantastic.
And no, this isn’t a ground-ball vs. flyball disagreement for a basic reason: it doesn’t matter … because he doesn’t make enough contact for it to matter.
Walker must develop much better plate discipline or he’ll sink deeper into the batter’s box that’s become his personal pit of quicksand.
Here’s a final thought: perhaps Jordan Walker should take the good advice and instruction being preached by St. Louis batting coach Brant Brown and stick with it?
Thanks for reading …
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch. Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast each week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” segment here at STL Sports with Bernie’s appearance on the Randy Karraker Show every Friday morning at 10:30 am.