Is Cardinals’ Jordan Walker already at a crossroads? Former top prospect running out of time to prove himself

Is Jordan Walker a bust? It’s a premature and unfair question to even ask about the St. Louis Cardinals’ ballyhooed young hitter, but his persistent struggles in the majors have invited such inquiries. 

This underlying reality — that Walker is fast approaching a crossroads of sorts with the organization that drafted him out of a Georgia high school in 2020 — is reflected by recent comments made by prominent manager Oliver Marmol and hitting coach Brant Brown. 

Brown on Tuesday said this of Walker during an appearance on KMOX radio: 

«On his daily structure level is, at some point in time he’s going to have to devote more focus on preparation. We’ve had long conversations on this. … When Jordan Walker is ready to be good, we all know the potential. I don’t even think he knows the ceiling.»

And then on Wednesday Marmol followed up with this to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: 

«I need to see Jordan have a sense of urgency for the things that need to take place in order to give him consistent results. That goes with his move toward the ball, his preparation in the cage but also his approach in a game.

«You have to start to see progress. I think it’s important as you are evaluating the next month, you need to start to see progress and consistency.»

This is candid stuff, especially by contemporary standards of media engagement. The somewhat direct nature of Brown’s and Marmol’s remarks are informed by Walker’s poor production, yes, but also his immense promise as a hitter.

The Cardinals believed in him enough to pop him with the No. 21 overall pick back in 2020 and then buy him out of a commitment to Duke with a $2.9 million signing bonus. In the minors, Walker appeared poised to exceed expectations, as he reached Double-A as a 20 year old and thrived at that lofty rung in 2022. The following season marked a key juncture for Walker and the Cardinals. Thanks to a hot couple of weeks in major-league spring training, the Cardinals added Walker, still age 20 at the time, to the Opening Day roster. In doing so, they skipped him past Triple-A entirely and tasked him with facing big-league pitchers while also learning an entirely new defensive position (he switched to right field from third base). Before April was up, Walker was back in the minors. 

In June, he was back in St. Louis, and he wound up with a credible rookie season. Since then, though, his offensive game has collapsed. Here are Walker’s key indicators in the majors across his three seasons: 

It’s not hard to see promise in Walker’s rookie campaign — especially in light of his age and the circumstances noted above — but things have very much trended in the wrong direction since then. Walker, even while lost at the plate, does have a couple of traits in his favor. To wit, he has elite bat speed, and he also hits the ball very hard: he’s in the 99th percentile in the former and the 89th percentile in the latter. Throughout his brief career, however, he’s struggled to elevate the ball, and when he does keep the ball off the ground he struggles to drive it to the pull side. That’s where power happens, broadly speaking. On an approach level, Walker has long been bedeviled by same-side breaking stuff away, and more generally he doesn’t take enough walks. 

To address these deficits — while also continuing to work on his defensive game in right field — Walker has already undertaken an array of stance and swing changes, mostly under Brown’s guidance. He’s altered his hand position. He’s tried standing closer to the plate, farther from the plate. He’s closed his stance, opened it, closed it again. There have been bursts of improvement at times when changes were introduced, but soon after Walker resumed swinging and missing and generally lacking batted-ball authority in the air when he did make contact. All of this is perhaps complicated by his being 6-foot-6. While such dimensions aren’t unexampled among successful hitters, models for Walker are hard to come by. There’s Aaron Judge. There’s maybe young James Wood, and … that’s about it? 

Needless to say, such failures and the rigors of grooving mechanical changes designed to address them have probably exacted a toll on Walker’s mentality. As he told The Athletic on Wednesday: 

«Sometimes, but not consciously. I’ll get in the box and think, ‘This is what’s comfortable right now,’ and it might be something that I used to do. Looking at the tape, I’m standing wide and getting more into my legs, and I’m stepping towards the plate. Even when I’m going bad, I’m doing that. It doesn’t feel like my old swing at all. Going back is, I guess, what’s comfortable, but when I look at the tape, it doesn’t look like the old swing. So now I’m trying to keep towards the approach.»

This all sounds, and looks, like a young hitter who’s quite confused right now. 

It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that is just that: young. Even though Walker is closing in on 1,000 career plate appearances at the highest level, he’s still just 23. To put that in context, the Marlins this season have the youngest crop of position players in the majors with an average age of 25.8. The default position should be that it’s too soon to give up on Walker, especially when he’ll have barely more than two years of MLB service time after this season and an option year remaining. 

There’s urgency in the words above, though, and the uncertainty of the winter in St. Louis. Longtime president of baseball operations John Mozeliak is stepping down, and he’ll be replaced by Chaim Bloom, who’s been rebuilding the Cardinals’ player-development system while preparing to take over as lead decision-maker after the current season. The question, which cannot be answered right now, is what he thinks of Walker’s long-term potential and whether he’s a viable part of the cohort of players who constitute the club’s future. The whole point of the 2025 season for the Cardinals, in the words of Mozeliak and others, was to provide «runway» for young players like Walker. The whole point of that was to provide Bloom with intel on those young players and whether they had a prominent place in St. Louis moving forward. Walker’s may be the most puzzling and vexing case of all. 

It’s September, which means there’s not much time for clarity before the Cardinals’ season very likely ends at the close of play on Sept. 28. As Marmol’s and Brown’s comments pointedly remind us, though, there’s ample time for Walker to leave them — and perhaps especially Bloom — with a positive final impression. Otherwise, that unsparing «bust» word might get bandied about more often.