On this day, 24 years ago, Jordan Walker was born. Happy Birthday! Young by baseball standards, it feels like we’ve been waiting on him FOREVER!
Authors Note: Some of you will fret about the VEB curse, rightfully so. I did a breakdown on Riley O’Brien the day before he blew a save in West Sacramento (the A’s). I also did one on Andre Pallante at the the start of his nosedive last year. But I did one earlier on Phil Maton and that worked out OK for him. So, I’m 1 for 3. With hope, Jordan won’t turn
into a pumpkin when the clock strikes midnight. If it does, blame me. The slipper will fit.
By now we have bypassed the small sample size in many offensive statistics and should now be seeing numbers that are “stable”. The key one I’ve been waiting for? 200 PAs. We crossed that threshold earlier this week.
I’ll start by showing you two StatCast player overviews. On the top (or left, depending on your screen orientation), who else but the current version of Jordan Walker. Take a look at the second one. Notice the similarities? I could show you spray charts and they would look equally and remarkably similar. VEB bucks awarded if you ascertain which player season this describes. Paul Goldschmidt, circa 2022.
The first question everyone is asking is … is it real? Is it sustainable? Each day that passes the answer seems to be leaning harder and harder to the “yes” side. Even as the season has unfolded, we have seen improvements. Defensively, baserunning, contact hitting and power. What might this look like over a full season? Last year, we were surprised when he succeeded. This year, we look forward to his ABs.
If you accept Goldy 2022 as comp, he racked up 6.8 fWAR and that is with a somewhat harsh positional adjustment, no? Walker plays RF, where the position adjustment is less and from the Statcast sheet, it appears his defense is rated better. Jordan will likely pick up a few runs in baserunning as well. Hmmm…7 WAR maybe? Somewhere, someone is thinking I’ve had a little too much hopium today.
You all can read the HRs, the OPS, wRC+ and all that and realize that this season is very different. What I want to venture into more is what does this mean for the Cardinal line-up, the future and the rebuild. I’ll harken back to the Starz model I published this past winter here. “We need more stars!” was a common refrain on the boards. The earlier article attempted to define what “more stars” meant, and I coined the term “Starz” to reflect my data-drive definition didn’t always comport with everyone’s subjective definition of a star. Remember that a Starz player is defined as one in the top 20th percentile of WAR. Here is how it looked back then:
In 2025, the 5 Starz were Winn, Donovan, Contreras, Gray and Liberatore. Not enough, as we saw on the field and also as we see in the data. When people say the Cardinals need more “star” players, they are correct. They need around 4 more (ie. 9, not 5)…Breaking it down a bit, the 2025 Cardinals had 3 hitters finish in the top 20th percentile (none in the top 10th) and 2 pitchers finished in the top 20th (one in the top 10th). Teams with 4-5-6 good players regularly just miss the playoffs. And they did.
The new management team followed this up by trading away 3 of those Starz. Going backwards at first is a common sign of a rebuild, no matter how it is branded. But, wait!! Having traded away 2 of the 3 Starz position players, the Cardinals find themselves in the unexpected situation where they still have (currently) three Starz on the field (Walker, Herrera, Wetherholt) with two more just outside that threshold (Burleson, Winn). Even better, two of them (Walker, Wetherholt) are on track to exceed the high side of the 3.8 fWAR median that a competitive team’s Starz must achieve.
Indeed, all five players are in the top 100 fWAR accumulators in 2026. Jordan Walker’s 2.1 fWAR comes in at 9, behind such luminaries as Witt Jr, Judge, Alvarez, Rice, De La Cruz, Langliers, Judge, Olsen. He is rubbing elbows with the elite of the elite. Not exactly just eking into the top 20%.
Burleson and Winn were on the edge of this in 2025, so their presence is not unexpected. It was clear Herrera would be there if health allowed. We all hoped that Wetherholt was as advertised and would learn quickly. His start-up has not been shocking (but pleasantly refreshing). At the start, it was reasonable to think the Cardinals might have 3 or 4 positional Starz on their roster, depending on how fast JJW Wetherholt adapted. Different names than 2025, but in the same range. Not enough, resulting in an offense expected to struggle at times.
The one that stands out and changes this picture is Jordan Walker. If you take 4 Starz (Wetherholt, Burleson, Winn, Herrera) and you add in a top 10 WAR provider, that really changes the complexion of the group. In the way Cal Raleigh’s season last year changed Seattle, or how Shohei Ohtani changes the Dodgers. In the way Paul Goldschmidt affected that 2022 Cardinal team. That is what we appear to be looking at here.
So, what has changed? You can read a Ben Clemons analysis here. I won’t repeat that take, but I will add a couple of things that stick out to me. There are some odd juxtapositions, but I think they make sense in concert. Start with the walk rate. He has moved from a career BB% (before this year) of around 7.5% to over 10% in 2026. That is a good (and sustainable) sign. But his chase rate has also risen (oddly?). It sits at 36%, up from a career norm of 30.1%. That doesn’t sound good, does it? Two other things sway the outlook. His waste swing% is at a career low 7.7% (those nasty sliders!!) AND his chase contact% has skyrocketed from 30 to 36%. This tells me he is getting way better contact on chase pitches and he is doing way better at spitting on the waste pitches. His overall output tells us that he is making great contact, so I take the net of this to be he is getting great plate coverage. I don’t know exactly how Statcast interprets a “chase” pitch (outside the shadow, but not a waste), but a man his size might actually have a different definition of a “chase” pitch. Plus, I think it reasonable to expect as he gains more confidence and has more success, these chases will trend down.
If you move beyond that, you can see his SquareUpSwing%, BlastSwing% and IdealAttackAngle% are all at career highs.
Add this all together, and I get a picture of 1) a player who is seeing the ball and recognizing pitches much better and 2) being much more willing to cut loose and hit the ball, instead of feeling his way through an AB.
My favorite is purely anecdotal. Look how well is he using all fields. That is a hitter.
How does this impact the line-up as a whole? Well, at the outset of the season, Masyn Winn was the clean-up hitter. With no disrespect to Masyn (one of my favorite players), if he is your clean-up hitter, your line-up has a problem. Insert a productive Jordan Walker, and it improves 2 spots in the order. Clean-up and wherever lower in the order Masyn hits. It takes pressure off the guys in front of him, lessening the outcomes of guys trying to do too much with pitcher’s pitches. And let’s face it. A 1-4 of Wetherholt, Herrera, Burleson and Jordan is a tough row to hoe for a pitcher. It’s been a while since we’ve seen that in these parts. Oli likes to muse that if you put enough pressure on the pitcher, he will break.
To be complete about what has changed, I want to lightly touch on some more subtle things. Walker’s baserunning value is quite high and that becomes more material as he gets on base more. I think of that as a force multiplier. If Walker gets on, he becomes a force with his legs that OPS doesn’t reflect. Likewise, look at his fielding run value. Smack dab in the middle. Now that really isn’t anything to shout about, except when you consider two things. One, where he was at 2 years ago (worst) and two, how dependent this team is on defense. Again, a force multiplier. He adds with his bat, but then does NOT subtract with his defensive play, like before.
Earlier, I talked about a maybe a 6-7 WAR season (he is already at 2.1). That is Wins Above Replacement (as in zero fWAR). Walker isn’t replacing zero fWAR, his improvement is from a base last year of -1.2 fWAR. The improvement the team experiences is actually a fair bit larger, where a 7 WAR season would be an 8.2 WAR improvement. If I had told you at the beginning of the year that the Cardinals were going to add an 8.2 WAR player, you’d be wondering how many millions of dollars that would take.
Also in the near-term impact: In a time that now seems so long ago (this past off-season), Cardinals fans agonized about how this line-up was deficient against left-handed pitching and how there was an obvious need for some solid right-handed hitters to mash. In ways, the angst was overblown, as the 2025 Cardinal offense operated at a near-league average of 97 wRC+, tied for 15th in the MLB. Middle-ish, not awful. The eye-test was worse, as it could be infuriating how seemingly any journey level left-hander could dominate the line-up. As we looked at 2026, having traded away two RH hitters (Arenado and Contreras) many wondered (and worried) how bad it could get. As we look today, having only subtracted, we look up and see the Cardinal line-up has improved against LH pitching, a bit, instead of backsliding. The current line-up is running a dead average 100 wRC+, good enough for 13th in MLB. Turns out, that RH hitter was there all along, right under our noses. Another would come in handy, but platoon-split guy will do now, opening the field up to more (and cheaper) options. And that guy may be in the organization already, too.
How about the future? In the short-term, I think it reasonable that if they add one more hitter to this line-up, it will become a line-up that could be called “deep”. In my hopes, that is Lars Nootbaar upon returning from injury. Six or seven guys in the top 50th percentile is a productive line-up. One that will be less prone to outages like the 6 shutouts in 2 weeks we saw in 2025. Subjectively, I think of it in terms of the line-up becomes good enough where they can put Nootbaar in the 7 hole and his baseline performance plays really well there and if he emerges like the metrics suggest, so much the better. That is what having a productive Walker in the line-up does. This is the manifestation of “makes everyone around him better”.
In the longer-term future? This one is murky. It seems like Jordan Walker’s emergence shortens the acceptable timeline for a rebuild. Unlike JJ Wetherholt, who has 5 more years of control after this year, there is a shorter “use by” date at the end, because Walker has but 3 years of control left after 2026 and it wouldn’t seem wise to spend 1 or 2 more years fooling around with recasting the pipeline. If they can’t extend him, it would seem unlikely he will be here in 2029, so maybe a 2-year window is open after 2026. In ways, his emergence will push not only the offense, but the front office. I will imagine they view this as a good problem to have. The truckload of money it might take to solve might be in the Soto/Guerrero Jr range.
