What if Jordan Walker doesn’t work out?

The beleaguered young batsman has been part of the spring discourse, and not in a good way

Outfielder Jordan Walker is once again a prominent topic of discussion among Cardinals observers because of his ongoing struggles at the plate and almost palpable inability to find a mechanical approach that works for him on a sustainable basis. It’s probably time to talk about this, but before we do I feel duty-bound to point out the obvious: It’s spring training.

You know all the reasons that spring outputs are not especially meaningful – the sample size, the quality of competition, the fact that players are often working on mechanical and repertoire changes to the detriment of in-game performance, and the fact that players know the games don’t count, among other reasons. For those very reasons, I’m obviously not prepared to say Jordan Walker has bottomed out or that he’s plainly un-fixable or that he’ll never find anything approaching his expected level of performance. “He’s 23,” will be the refrain here until such time as he’s not 23.

This isn’t to say I’m optimistic about him – I’m not especially, while still dreaming on his elite exit velocities and bat speed – but that has little to do with Grapefruit League performance. He has major issues at making contact, recognizing spin, and elevating the ball. One of those would be hard enough to solve, but having all three of those deficits at once? Fixing all that is a titan’s burden for Walker and the staff tasked with developing him. Let’s also note that, yes, his spring results have been grim. Going into Friday’s tilt against the Mets, Walker had a slash line of .162/.205/.162 in 40 Grapefruit League plate appearances with a K% of 38.5 and an xwOBA of .185. He’s also got an average launch angle of -4 degrees against right-handed pitching and an overall ground-ball rate of 68.2%. That’s quite ugly, and at one point his performance prompted the club to pull him from the lineup for multiple days in the hitting lab.

These are additional data points, even if they’re not nearly as meaningful as those we get from regular-season play. Taken as a whole, there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. Do the Cardinals commit to steady and season-long playing time for him at the highest level even if he continues looking utterly adrift at the plate? Or do they at some point burn that final option year of Walker’s (thus undermining his future trade value, should it come to that), and hope that he finds his legs in Memphis or even a lower rung?

It’s not productive to autopsy why this has happened given the front-office turnover and that the past is the past. No doubt, his premature promotion in 2023, in which he was skipped past Triple-A at the age of 20 based on a couple of weeks of a high but somewhat empty batting average in spring training, played a role. Walker has also been somewhat reluctant to embrace the changes being pushed on him by the organization, although that no longer seems to be the case.

All of that isn’t really the point of our present discussion, as implied by the headline. This is about a question that, while grim to contemplate, seems increasingly plausible in its assumptions: What if Jordan Walker doesn’t pan out?

The Cardinals have infamously struggled to identify and develop young thumpers in the outfield in recent years, and Walker’s difficulties threaten to perpetuate that trend. That said, this isn’t the NBA, in wwhich one high pick’s failure to meet expectations can set a club back for years. This is baseball, in which any one player’s contributions are structurally limited – a mere four or five trips to the plate in a given game, one start on the mound every five days or so, an inning at time out of the bullpen maybe three times a week. Yes, there’s much riding on Walker’s development, but there’s less riding on it in the context of what baseball is, which is a sport that blunts the ability of any single player to determine the outcome of a game or a season. You know this, of course, but it’s easy for multi-sport consumers (like me, for instance) to apply faultily our basketball or football mindsets to this game.

So that’s good. What’s also good is that the Cardinals have multiple places to turn in the event that Walker isn’t able to make the necessary improvements. There’s a related discussion about whether young Victor Scott II can improve his batted-ball outcomes – via either hitting the ball harder or, in light of his tremendous speed, putting it on the ground more often – and be a long-term solution in center. His tremendous defensive value certainly lowers his offensive bar, but Scott needs to improve his on-base skills significantly. As such, it’s possible the Cardinals will need to find not one but two outfielders – three in the event that the convalescing Lars Nootbaar is traded at some point this season. So keep that in mind as we run down the possibilities to come.