Oli Marmol wake-up call may have saved Jordan Walker's Cardinals future

With John Mozeliak opting for a soft sell at last week's trade deadline, the St. Louis Cardinals officially shifted their focus to the future beyond 2025. The next two months are no longer about scratching and clawing toward a Wild Card spot; it's about letting Chaim Bloom determine who is and isn't a part of the team's foundation moving forward.

Which, for a couple of players in particular, means it's time for the rubber to hit the road. Outfielder Jordan Walker, for instance, has been the next big thing for years now, only to fall flat as a hitter in the Majors. Now, with Bloom coming in and the team set for big changes, Walker no longer has the luxury of time. Manager Oli Marmol made that abundantly clear earlier this week, when he responded to questions about Walker's playing time by saying "at some point, you have to make it impossible for the manager to take you out".

It would've been easy to assume that Marmol's comment was a clear indication that Walker wasn't a part of St. Louis' long-term plans. That it had abandoned any hope of him developing into the middle-of-the-order bat everyone hoped he'd become when he was one of the top prospects in all of baseball. The regime that drafted Walker is heading out the door, and second straight subpar season could burn what good will he has left.

Instead, Walker has used it as fuel.

That blast was part of a 3-for-4 effort from Walker in St. Louis' win over the rival Chicago Cubs on Friday night, all three of which were absolutely scalded. It's yet another solid day in a sneaky run full of them: Walker is now slashing .318/.366/.455 in the second half, looking a bit more like the player the Cardinals expected him to be by now.

There's still a long way to go declare Walker anything other than a bust relative to expectations. But he's still just 23 years old, and he's offered yet another reminder of his obvious physical tools. And if Marmol's wake-up call was what he needed for it all to come together, it changes everything for the Cardinals.

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Jordan Walker's resurgence would be franchise-altering for the Cardinals

It's hard to overstate how important Walker remains to St. Louis' timeline. The Cardinals don't have a ton of other young outfield talent, as the farm system is thin and Victor Scott II has yet to show that he can be an MLB-caliber hitter to go with his spectacular glove in center field. Alec Burleson are nice pieces, but hardly stars, and both of them will likely hit free agency before the next competitive Cardinals team; St. Louis needs Walker to hit, or else it'll have a massive hole to fill.

Of course, we still don't know whether that will happen. The odds remain against it: Walker's contact profile hasn't changed all that much over his recent hot streak; he still hits the ball on the ground too much and he doesn't pull the ball in the air nearly enough, which is how a guy with 99th-percentile bat speed and 86th-percentile exit velocity manages to do so little damage. (Well, that and a sky-high chase rate.)

But Walker now has eight weeks to tell Bloom that he isn't going anywhere. The runway that the Cardinals have given Walker, Nolan Gorman and the rest of this young core is running out, and the timeline of this rebuild will be determined by how they respond.