Walker, Gorman and the question that shapes the Cardinals’ rebuild
One of the more difficult tasks this season for the St. Louis Cardinals will be sorting through short-term results and determining which challenges are immediate and which are more of a concern for years to come.
It likely does not need to be said at every opportunity that the organization views success in 2026 as less essential than success in the future, but that also does not absolve everything that happens this season from being weighed along that path.
Nolan Gorman’s 2026 matters. Jordan Walker’s 2026 matters. Whether the two of them can develop into reliable impact hitters in the middle of the lineup matters a great deal and will perhaps ultimately be the pivot point that determines exactly how long a rebuild needs to be. Early returns — the very earliest of them — could scarcely be more encouraging. Now they must keep it up for six more months.
“To start the season, remove today, I feel like [Walker]’s been missing the way he wants to miss,” manager Oli Marmol said after Sunday’s loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, in which Walker had three hits, including a home run and a double. “The swings have looked better, the approach has been better, and then you look at the results we got today? Man, that’s a really, really good day.”
Walker scored six runs in three games against the Rays, the most by any Cardinal in the first three games of a season since Fernando Tatis scored seven in 2000 (and, strangely, 1999), according to Baseball-Reference. The three extra-base hits he recorded in the series represented the first time he’d posted that many in a single series since Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 2023, when he tallied three doubles against the Cincinnati Reds.
Results are great. Runs are great. Homers and doubles are great. What matters is process. There’s no such thing as linear progress, and Walker will inevitably slip into old habits that see his back leg collapse and his pitch recognition wane against breaking balls down and away. Against former teammate Steven Matz, though, he eschewed those chase habits and held back to punish a changeup low in the strike zone. That is a pitch a previous version of Walker would’ve pounded into the ground, at best. Instead, he elevated it into the bleachers in left-center.
“For a game like today, just something to [hold] on to,” Walker said. “When things get a little off, I can always come back to a game like today where I’m starting my approach. It’s just nice for a little rubric.”
In that same game that saw Walker wrap up a strong first series, Gorman punished a ball far over the home bullpen, partway down a corridor leading back to the main concourse. The 443-foot shot was the second-longest in the majors this season to date — he jokingly chastised a reporter who read off the distance — and was followed Monday by another deep homer that drew the Cardinals closer in a game they would eventually drop to the New York Mets.
Hot streaks and strong stretches are nothing new to Gorman. The Cardinals seem willing to accept that pattern as they simultaneously seek to cut down on the intervals between active periods. Eliminating all swing-and-miss from Gorman’s game is not a realistic goal, but arming him with the tools to force pitchers into positions more favorable for him may very well be.
“I’m more focused on wins, whatever I can do to help this club,” a self-effacing Gorman said after Monday’s loss, before delving deeper into his approach against Mets starter Clay Holmes. “He attacked [Alec Burleson] the same way. Threw him a a change up the first two pitches, so I had the change up in the back of my mind and was able to just react.”
The slider Holmes served up to Gorman was undoubtedly a spinner in the fat part of the plate, but Gorman’s recognition of the veteran’s shifting approach from early in the game — and his own willingness to adjust — stand out in his description. Burleson, with a very high contact rate, is likely to be pitched somewhat differently than Gorman, but with one batter’s distance separating the two in the lineup, and with the pair representing the team’s most dangerous power threats from the left side, being able to draw those comparisons should give him some advantage in the chess game at the plate.
“There’s enough power in there where if he makes contact, the ball goes,” Marmol said. “We’re seeing a much better version of him, of putting the ball in play, not a ton of swing and miss. We’ve talked about it for a while, but when he’s in that mode, man, it’s a really solid at bat.”
Gorman was arbitration eligible for the first time last winter. Walker will be for the first time this coming winter. Both, somehow, are two of the more experienced and familiar faces to Cardinals fans on a reshaped big league roster. Both, too, have undergone the familiar feelings of prospect fatigue that set in when a highly touted player comes up short of early expectations and reasonable questions form around the kind of big leaguer they’re able to be.
Nothing about either of their futures will be decided in a stretch of less than one week and fewer than 20 at-bats. This is a season for evaluation, and no two individuals anywhere in the organization will be more intensely scrutinized than Gorman and Walker. Team control is real, and timelines are not infinite. There’s a whole lot of time and space to figure out what other players are and can be.
That’s much less true for the two of them. The time needs to be now. They’re off sprinting, and there will be anxious eyes waiting to see how long it lasts.
