Resurgent Walker carrying his end of the deal. When will the Cardinals catch up?
Before Jordan Walker’s major league-leading eighth home run of the season landed in the Cleveland bullpen Monday night, the Faustian bargain for the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans was laid bare. The homer cut the Cardinals’ deficit from 6-1 to 6-2, en route to their third consecutive loss and second straight by a final score of 9-3.
If this is all there is — if a season designed to be about next season and the season after that is sprinkled with noncompetitive defeats — then that must happen in league with precious progress. If it’s true that Walker is the single most important figure in the organization, at least for the duration of this year, then the thing to watch is the ball, not the scoreboard. That’s simple enough to accept in concept; it’s now time to stare down lived reality.
Cardinals manager Oli Marmol quipped over the weekend that he’d be happy to answer the same questions about Walker’s power surge every time it emerges, and so he has. Walker entered play Tuesday with homers in his last three games, six of his last seven and seven of his last nine.
That has been accompanied by multi-hit games in three of his last four, and he is just decimals behind Andy Pages of the Los Angeles Dodgers for the best wins above replacement total in baseball. Already, Walker is more than three wins better than he was last season, when he tallied a minus-1.7 by Baseball Reference’s measure.
“The work and the preparation is key,” Marmol said. “He’s benefitting from that a ton right now. An absolute ton. You can just see the calmness in which he’s taking his at bats. When you’re prepared for the test, man, it’s a lot easier to go up there and trust it.”
Preparation — the thinking and lack of thinking — is the through line that echoes among those who have been around Walker the most over the last couple of seasons of struggle. Marmol has laid out a description of a hitter who is working and studying with full conviction prior to games, but throwing an all-important switch when the lights come on that allows him to trust that preparation rather than sweating through it in real time.
Those changes have coincided not just with the arrival to the big league staff of former Double-A hitting coach Casey Chenoweth, but also with a public incident toward the end of last season in which Marmol and hitting coach Brant Brown were pilloried for making public some of their concerns about Walker’s process. It was the first time — by design — those concerns were released into the public sphere, and whether coincidental or causal, the change in Walker followed soon after.
Walker groaned last week when asked about the shifts in the stats underlying his swing decisions, which demonstrate him swinging at 6% fewer pitches outside the zone and 3% more pitches inside the zone. The result is a contact rate 6% higher on pitches outside the zone and, crucially, the highest percentage of pitches delivered to him inside the zone in his four-season career.
More simply: Through discipline and selection, pitchers have to come to him rather than carving the outside corner, and pitchers who come to him tend to get punished. This is the first time in his major league career that he has forced the issue, and it is paying off in enormous dividends.
“One thing I’ve been doing is trying to keep it as simple as possible,” he said. “See ball, hit ball. I can’t go the whole season expecting the chase isn’t going to happen…When I’m locked in, I shouldn’t miss, and that’s how I drive the ball and drive the ball to the gaps. Just trusting my plan and trusting my instincts.”
There is no overstating the importance of Walker’s progress. If he is fully solidifying himself as the game-changing hitter he has always shown promise of becoming, then the Cardinals have a true mid-lineup tentpole that could define their next 10 years. That is an excellent place to start, even as it becomes increasingly unclear how many, if any, members of the current pitching staff will be part of the next championship-caliber team in St. Louis.
Nine other players take the field with Walker on any given night, and if there are struggles throughout that group, there’s a real risk those struggles could cloud the brightness of his catching fire. Through most of the Cardinals’ first dozen games, there has been a strong focus on crisp play, balanced effort and finding contributions from unexpected sources. Before the recent three-game losing streak, they ran through a three-game winning streak. Some of that play has sagged since returning home from Washington and running into a Boston Red Sox buzzsaw that former Cardinal Willson Contreras was able to plug into.
Ebbs come with flows. There will be patience required, along with bargaining. Walker’s 80-homer pace does not push fast-forward on the lagging parts of the lineup.
“I think the ability to maintain what we have in this clubhouse is going to be probably the biggest factor going into that, just making sure that we stay in a good spot,” said Matthew Liberatore, Monday’s starter, who fought his command to complete five innings on a career-high 105 pitches. “We’re not panicking, we’re not stressing, we’re not pressing for anything. And I definitely don’t think that’s the case right now.”
The Cardinals are best served if he’s right. There’s a long way to go. The bargains feel different on the other side of the white lines.