It may not seem like it, but that was a few years ago Jordan Walker it was the top five consensus opinion in all of baseball. Walker entered the 2023 season as the best player in the NL and was expected to make a big impact for the Cardinals. That, of course, never panned out. Walker turned in a solid but underwhelming rookie campaign in which he posted a 116 wRC+ while struggling defensively in the outfield. He followed that up with atrocious performances in 2024 and ’25, compiling a .211/.270/.324 (68 wRC+) line in 574 plate appearances that left him closer to the team’s roster bubble than the middle of the lineup.
12 games into the 2026 season, things couldn’t be more different. The Cardinals entered this year expected to contend as they began a rebuild that led to a trade. Sonny Gray, Wilson Contreras, Nolan Arenadoagain Brendan Donovan in the winter. With that trade (and Lars Nootbaar starting the year on the injured list), the Cards had plenty of roster space to give Walker another shot, despite his past struggles. That is paying off so far, as Walker has started to look like the player he was expected to be. In 49 plate appearances to start the year, Walker slashed .295/.367/.682 with a 191 wRC+. He has hit five home runs this year after hitting that same number in 51 games during the 2024 season and hitting just one in 111 games last year.
It’s hard to imagine a better start to the season than Walker has had, but it’s still good to wonder how much of it is real. After all, the appearance of 49 plates is a small sample. A 43-PA stretch from July 19 to July 29 last year saw Walker slash .342/.419/.500 with little favoritism around him. The same can be said for a 51-PA stretch from September 1 to September 18 in 2024, where he hit .271/.314/.583. Those brief spurts of production serve as cautionary tales for relying too heavily on small sample sizes in the first season, and it’s guaranteed that Walker’s numbers will come back down to Earth to at least some degree in due course.
However, with that being said, it’s important to note that the underlying metrics are more reliant on Walker’s performance now than ever. That aforementioned stretch from July 2025 saw Walker own a .481 BABIP. This year, by contrast, Walker has a .320 BABIP so far that is more or less in line with his career stat of .310. His 10.2% walk rate is the best of his career, and his 23.3% slugging rate to this point is ridiculous. Walker’s expected batting average (.309) and slugging percentage (.712) are both even better than his actual production this year, and his .453 xwOBA largely supports his .457 wOBA.
Those are all very encouraging signs, but there are still red flags that need to be addressed. Walker’s 28.6% strikeout rate this year is consistently high, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. It’s impossible to be successful when you pull that off all the time, but it’s definitely more difficult. Of the 30 most qualified hitters in the majors last year by wRC+, only four of them had a strikeout rate north of 26%. Those four players were Raleigh, Kyle Schwarber, Byron Buxtonagain Rafael Devers. All hit at least 35 homers, with Raleigh and Schwarber hitting more than that. Buxton’s 27.3% strikeout rate led the team, and that’s more than a full point below where Walker sits.
While Walker may be on pace for a 68-homer right now, it’s an open question whether he’ll be able to hit the 40-homer mark that would be needed to make him one of the league’s top hitters by the end of the year. Of course he doesn’t need to be among the league’s stars to be a productive big leaguer. Wyatt Langford hit 22 homers last year with a 26.9% strikeout rate, and still posted a 118 wRC+ thanks to a high walk rate. I mean Lawrence ButlerThe 2025 season, in which he hit 28.4% of the time against a 9.4% walk rate with 21 homers and a wRC+ of 96, would be a huge win for Walker considering where he was heading into 2026. All of that sounds like it could be achieved at the moment, or all it would take is a big drop from start to finish. 24 year old mercurial.
How do MLBTR readers expect Walker’s 2026 campaign to fare? Will he emerge as the cornerstone the Cardinals thought they had when they were climbing the rankings a few years ago? Will this be a satellite to what ends up being another disappointing year? Or will he finish somewhere hoping that he might be a strong guy going forward? Have your say in the poll below:
