It’s time Jordan Walker prove he’s the player the Cardinals always believed he can be
There is not a more important singular figure who will take the field for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2025 than Jordan Walker.
Perhaps there’s quibbling to be done over the impact of Chaim Bloom’s ascendance when it comes to the organization as a whole, but on the field, there’s really no competition.
Walker will have a season in 2025 in which he takes big strides toward becoming the hitter his skills and growth suggest he can be, or he won’t. Either path will result in the Cardinals making important decisions about his future; the positive road, for them, seems a great deal less grim.
He is not yet 23 years old. He has 21 homers in the big leagues. He has been, by OPS+, one notch better than a league average hitter through one solid and one lost season.
Development is not linear and no two paths are the same. There’s a limitless supply of disclaimers, but there’s only one Walker. There’s nothing left but to show it.
“Honestly, I obviously wasn’t happy with my offense last year,” Walker said last week at the team’s Winter Warm-Up. “I think that if I produce offensively, they’re going to give me chances. So it’s really on me to produce, and that really has been my main focus.”
Over the last two winters, so much of the focus on Walker has been about his defense and whether he’ll be able to adjust sufficiently well to the outfield that his value on that side of the ball won’t undercut what he can provide with the bat. The problem, though, is that Walker simply didn’t hit well enough in 2024; his .619 OPS in the big leagues was paired with a .753 mark at Triple-A, which was more than 30 points worse than his MLB total in his rookie season.
Twice now he’s broken camp with the Cardinals only to be sent down in April. In 2023, that was a far more temporary detour, and he still played 117 games in the majors. Last year, that total was down to just 51, and Walker went four and a half months toiling for Memphis before being called up at the end of August.
Each of those roster decisions may have been defensible – correct, even – at the time they were executed, but they result in a cumulative yo-yo effect that clearly left Walker searching for proof that he belonged and for reassurance that he was making appropriate progress.
By the time he returned to the big leagues last summer, he was quiet, reserved and clearly feeling the weight of the situation.
It’s difficult, or perhaps even irresponsible, to freely speculate on a players moods and motives based on what he’s willing to show off at a press conference, but it was difficult to miss the change in his enthusiasm from one year to the next. After being simply asked how his winter was going, Walker spoke for nearly three minutes with only one brief interruption about his progress with new hitting coach Brant Brown, delving deep into his process for returning to the hitter he used to be.
He sounded like someone happy to be hitting, not someone carrying the weight of missing answers.
“There’s no secret,” he said. “I didn’t make a lot of contact, as much contact as I needed. I wanted to start there, and then as the off season went on, as I get more comfortable with that swing, then we start working on what’s going to be the most consistent way for me to hit. Hit line drives, drive a ball in the gap. So that’s really where my off season started.
“Trying to get back to my original swing, but kind of building off of it so I can produce more.”
Walker would scarcely be the first young player to get lost in the sauce of a whirlwind rise to the majors. Shortstop Masyn Winn mused that the hardest thing about making an adjustment in the majors is making the next adjustment, and Walker enthusiastically agreed. After a while, when so many changes build upon themselves, a player can become a hitter of Theseus, made up of so many new parts that it’s hard to see the original underneath.
Add on a position change on top of it, and it’s no wonder that the aggressive hitter who drove the action in the low minors went through stretches of his sophomore season looking timid and reactive, and clearly casting about for solutions. That’s not an indictment of Walker, the Cardinals, or former hitting coach Turner Ward. That is, in some cases, the way the development path works.
Now, it’s incumbent on Walker and the Cardinals to straighten it out. The time for ambling down the road has passed, and now the direction must be true. Otherwise, there will be different and difficult decisions to make about which branch is the next to be chosen.
“You can do all the training, you can look good in the cage, you can feel good in the cage,” Walker mused, days ahead of his first rounds of live batting practice. “What matters is when you’re facing the actual pitcher…definitely going to be one of the first ones in the box, and see how it goes.”
