The secret behind Jordan Walker's surprising Cardinals resurgence

Can a 24-year-old have a comeback tour? Maybe. Jordan Walker thinks so.

The St. Louis Cardinals’ right fielder has gotten off to a sizzling hot (like one of those fajita plates with all the peppers and onions making that hsssssssssssss sound when the waiter brings it over — that hot) start. So sizzling, in fact, that some are calling his fourth season in the big leagues an attempted comeback from very disappointing 2024 and 2025 seasons after a promising first year in 2023. 

He claims (as he did after the 2024 season) that he made a major offseason change to recapture his legitimately freakish power-hitting profile; this time, he’s switched up his workout profile to help him control his swing better after a detailed analysis of his body and musculature. He lost somewhere between six and 16 pounds, depending on the source, so now instead of being 6-6, 266 pounds, he is either 6-6 and 260 or 250 pounds. He seems to think it will make all the difference in the batter’s box.

Body transformation or not, Jordan Walker is crushing so far this season

If we’re just talking production … I mean, my god man. He is killing the baseball right now. Walker currently leads the Major Leagues with five home runs; for reference, he had six all of last year and five in 2024 after smoking 16 in his first year. For someone in the top half of the league in swing rate, walking at a solid clip and batting .295 is terminator behavior. Meanwhile, he is a solid defensive right fielder in range and god-tier in terms of arm talent. If this keeps up (it surely won’t) we are in for quite the statistical season.

Walker is huge (as discussed above) and his physical tools grade out like some kind of right-fielder cyborg with mechanized bat-swinging technology. That has not borne out in reality. Walker slashed a respectable .276/.342/.445 in his first year and has since fallen off across the board. Last year, his whiff rate was a completely noncompetitive 35.6 percent. But the physical tools are tantalizing, and Walker is the kind of project that teams will always invest in because of the potential to send baseballs to the troposphere. 

And this year, we have ourselves some compound interest. Hang onto your hats for these 2026 percentiles: average exit velocity? 100th percentile. Expected Slugging? 100th percentile. Bat speed? 99th percentile. Barrel rate? 99th percentile. Hard hit rate? 100th percentile. Arm value? 96th percentile. Spring speed? 94th percentile. From his Savant page alone, it looks like Walker could throw a baseball from Alaska to Montana, run there before it arrived and then hit it clean to Vladivostok. 

Compare those to his splits in 2025, and you have basically a different baseball player. His swing speed is consistently ridiculous, but his dividends from said swing speed have … quadrupled? Sextupled? Dodecatupled? 

Walker may just be making better decisions, rather than benefiting from new physical tools

Without a model (that would require many more at-bats of the physiologically refreshed Walker) to test if he is actually reaching less or is simply seeing the ball better for a relatively small number of ABs, we can only speculate if Walker’s offseason workout has any correlation with increased production. Personally, I think there may be more evidence to say he’s just making better decisions. 

One of the biggest problems for Walker the last two years was a problematically low walk rate. For a power hitter who swings the bat 100 miles per hour, you’re always going to strike out at an above-average rate. But Walker is now … walking an above-average 10.2 percent of at-bats. I don’t know if that has anything to do with a revamped physique so much as it does recommit to plate discipline. Even so, his physical transformation could give him the confidence he needs to actually seek specific pitches — which he’s doing, taking his -6 run value on fastballs up to a +4 so far this season.

The question for Walker is this: can he avoid just becoming Oneil Cruz 2: The Sequel? His entire career, Cruz has had ludicrous exit velocity and bat speed numbers, much like Walker, but is also a detrimental defensive player who can’t get his average above .250 and strikes out a stupid amount.

Cruz’s whiff problems, much like Walker’s, probably don’t come down to physical issues that can be smoothed out in offseason workouts so much as simple decision making and chasing. If he can avoid those problems going forward, he can be an All-Star slugger. If he regresses back to the mean, offseason workouts and all, he might get traded before he signs his first extension. Only time (and home runs, whiff rates and exit velo) will tell.

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