Jordan Walker is Finally Taking Off. Is it Sustainable?

I can forgive St. Louis Cardinals fans for not being very optimistic heading into this year. Their recent past has contained a rare changing of the guard in the baseball ops department as well as the initiation of a plan to retool the roster. It’s not often this organization enters a season without the goal of winning the NL Central, but while they’d obviously appreciate that, it’s clear that the mid-2020s have not been their time. Such a turn of events for a fanbase that had grown accustomed to winning can be hard to digest at first, and the ensuing pessimism can trickle down. It’s not like the roster is completely devoid of talent, but not too long ago, hope did not spring eternal regarding, say, Jordan Walker’s ability to break out after two disappointing seasons.

Well, we’re only three weeks into the year, but the Cardinals have started 10-8 and Walker is right in the middle of it. At the time of writing, he leads the majors in home runs with 8 and boasts a slash line of .319/.373/.710. His 198 wRC+ is top-10 among qualified hitters. His 1.2 fWAR is top-5. St. Louis, and the fantasy community at large, have been dreaming on a Walker breakout for years now. He was the 4th-best prospect in baseball before his debut in 2023 according to MLB Pipeline and put up a pretty good rookie season (116 wRC+) before floating through the abyss from 2024-2025 (68 wRC+). Last fall, Walker reported that he had “found something” while training at Driveline as he worked to finally unlock his potential. At the time, that tidbit of news was worth taking into consideration but didn’t change his long-term outlook all that much. He has performed below replacement level for longer than he hasn’t and possessed both 99th-percentile bat speed and excellent sprint speed for a while now; talent was never the problem. Walker consistently producing at the plate is something we’ve yet to see until now.

If he doesn’t completely disappear over the next couple weeks, this will go down as the best month of his career. The last time he posted a wOBA over .400 in a single month was June 2023 at the dawn of his career, and he’s at .467 so far in April. I’d be quite surprised if he led the league in homers and had a wRC+ anywhere near 200 by season’s end: His BABIP currently sits at .350, nearly 40 points above his career norm, and over 30% of his flyballs have left the yard, nearly triple his career norm. At the same time, his underlying numbers are excellent: His xwOBA is not too far behind reality at .451, his hard-hit rate is a hair over 60%, and his xwOBA on balls in play is in excess of .600. To say he’s destroying the baseball is an understatement, and he made some adjustments to do so.

In the past, Walker has struggled to harness that elite bat speed even when he did make contact because he hit the ball on the ground far too much. This season, he has completely flipped the switch. Observe:

It’s easy to do more damage when you’re lifting the ball. This is a dramatic change in profile for Walker, who went from one of the most groundball-oriented hitters in the game to one of the least without much in between, and it appears to be tied directly to a change he made to his mechanics.

A look at his career bat tracking specs reveals that Walker has constantly tinkered with his approach in an effort to put his raw skills to good use. He had an extremely open stance when he first debuted but has since closed it off considerably. His bat path was fairly upper-cut in his rookie year and has flattened out recently. He has stood deep in the box, closer to home plate, with his feet close together, and with his feet far apart – trying all of the above just to see if anything sticks. In 2026, though, the big change has been his timing: His attack angle is a few degrees steeper, meaning the sweet spot of his bat is on a more upward trajectory at contact. It’s no wonder that more flyballs, and home runs, have followed.

Tinkering with swing tilt is fairly difficult to do year-over-year. Increasing attack angle, optimizing the position of the sweet spot for more quality contact in the air, is a much more acute adjustment that’s paying off for Walker. Possibly related is a change he has made to his stance: Around the midpoint of last year, he stood in the box with his left foot offset from his right. This year, he’s standing straighter and a little more closed. Perhaps he finds it easier to be on time by positioning himself this way.

Digging even further into the story behind his excellent early results, it may be a cause for concern that Walker, who has never shown plus bat-to-ball skill at the big-league level, is making contact on only 78% of his swings in the zone, which would be a career-low and an indication that the slight improvement to his strikeout rate from the low-30s to the high-20s may not hold up. He’s still missing over 40% of the non-fastballs he’s swinging at despite doing considerably more damage to them when he does make contact. A more encouraging development is that he’s chasing less across the board; his 28% chase rate would be a personal best by a considerable margin if it holds.

While he almost certainly won’t continue his 72-homer pace or produce like the National League variant of Aaron Judge the rest of the way, Jordan Walker is giving people plenty of reasons to believe that he’s in for a career year. The latest wave of adjustments he has made to his swing are finally clicking, and while he hasn’t completely overhauled his subpar plate skills, he’s putting himself in a far better position to come up with game-changing hits and compensate for that. It’s easy to forget that he’s only 23 years old considering how long it feels like people have been waiting for him to truly take that next step. He’s also 6’6″ and 250 lbs with an intriguing toolset; he wasn’t going to be held down forever. The Cardinals’ pleasantly surprising record is already outpacing expectation based on run differential but regardless of what 2026 holds for them, if this breakout is a sign of what’s to come for Walker, their retool might not take as long as we previously thought.

All stats entering April 16, 2026.