SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — “Maybe it’s a weird analogy,” says Randy Flores.
Flores, the amateur scouting director for the St. Louis Cardinals, had just wrapped up an extended holiday-themed metaphor. Imagine, he said, buying a Christmas present for your child. You smuggle it home unnoticed, stashing it in some unexamined spot in the house. On Christmas Eve, you load it full of batteries, wrap it in glistening paper and festive ribbon and delicately place it in prime position under the tree. You grin in anticipation of the next morning, when its decorative exterior will be ripped to shreds in rapturous joy, revealing the coveted item within.
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“It’s similar,” Flores says, “to when a prospect pans out.”
Waiting for Christmas can be quite the test of patience — nobody counts down to Arbor Day — and the baseball draft even more so. It can take years for even the most highly coveted amateurs to crack the majors and justify their selections. Groundhog Day might be a more fitting facsimile; on draft day, prospects poke their heads into the light, often only to submerge again, destined for a prolonged stay in the relative darkness of the minors.
The Cardinals, though, appear to have identified the exception. Two years ago, they drafted long and lanky high school slugger Jordan Walker with their first-round pick, No. 21 overall. At the time, Walker was highly regarded, if viewed as a bit of a project. He could put a charge in the ball, but he might need some work making contact. Walker, wrote Baseball America, “could be an average or slightly better hitter.” Walker is blowing past those projections these days.
Two years into his career, Walker hasn’t hit the ground running so much as he’s hit it in a race car. Only 20, he’s already completed a full season at Double A, where he hit .306 with an .898 OPS. He crushes the ball just as everyone knew he would, yet he also draws walks and makes frequent good contact. Such a performance at such a young age tends to earn admirers. Back in August, for instance, Keith Law of The Athletic rated Walker as the seventh-best prospect in the game.
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Call it the premature onset of spring or the early arrival of Santa — Flores is right, holiday analogies are weird — but what’s clear is that the Cardinals have a budding star on their hands. Walker’s metrics, above and below the surface, have few precedents. “How many players at 20 have been at that Double-A level,” asks St. Louis farm director Gary LaRocque, “and accomplished right away what he accomplished?” Vanishingly few.
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Now, as Walker tears up the Arizona Fall League to tie a pretty bow on his sophomore campaign, Cardinals fans find themselves eagerly awaiting the morning he shows up under their tree at Busch Stadium. With a natural aptitude for the game, he is poised to tear through what few challenges the minors have left to present him. With a strong work ethic, one that doesn’t let him take it easy even when things come that way, he’s well-equipped to succeed against the much greater test of big-league competition.
“I want to make it as soon as possible,” Walker says.
SEE 👏 YOU 👏 LATER 👏
Jordan Walker demolishes a dead center bomb at Sloan Park to give the Rafters the lead! #AFL22 @Cardinals @Sgf_Cardinals #Cardinals pic.twitter.com/UA5CcbWn9A
— MLB's Arizona Fall League (@MLBazFallLeague) October 25, 2022
Given his trajectory so far, it won’t be that long a wait. Christmas Day is just around the corner.
Midway through the summer of 2020, Flores’ phone pinged with a text message. Cardinals hitting coordinator Russ Steinhorn was at the team’s alternate site in Springfield, Mo., where Walker was taking his first batting practice as a professional. As ball after ball screamed off his bat, a preview of what the right-handed slugger would do on that same field two years later, the coach sent the scouting director a brief note of congratulations.
“This guy,” Steinhorn wrote to Flores, “has the potential to be very, very special.”
Walker has a knack for making that kind of first impression. The things he can do with a baseball bat, while quantifiable with modern metrics, are nonetheless hard to comprehend. In his first professional season in 2021, according to Baseball America, he hit balls as hard as 116 mph, a threshold reached this season by only 17 players in the majors. He squares up center-cut meatballs and pitcher’s pitches alike. “He’ll hit some balls that some guys won’t even make contact with, or they’d be little dribblers, and they’ll be like 105 or 106 (mph),” Steinhorn says. In one recent fall league game, says teammate Masyn Winn, Walker only clipped a ball but “hit it 103 off the wall.”
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Walker has long possessed easy pop. Jonathan Paden, who coached him from Little League through high school, saw it as early as age 7. “He always had the natural instincts to square the ball up,” Paden says. Walker played up a level all through his youth, yet he was often the best player on the field. “He would always come through for us,” Paden says. “There were so many games we won thanks to Jordan alone.” When his body caught up to his talent, it all came together.
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That happened early in high school. The Walkers are a tall clan — his dad is 6-foot-2 and his mom is 5-10 — although for nearly all of middle school Walker lagged behind his younger sister Maya in height. (“It bugged me every day,” he says. “She’s six-foot now.”) When he finally sprouted, so did his professional prospects. Balls began to disappear into the trees beyond the fence in batting practice. A veteran of the travel ball circuit in Georgia since he was 12, Walker began hitting the major showcases around the country in high school. His arrival at any tournament turned heads. “Every team we’d go by, every field,” Paden remembers, “everybody in the dugout is turning around to look at Jordan.”
Walker, who is now 6-5, was officially on the radar.
Watching closely were the Cardinals. While the industry had questions about Walker’s ability to make enough contact to succeed in professional baseball, St. Louis was becoming gradually more convinced that he’d hit. Flores and other evaluators scrutinized Walker’s showcase performances, studying the underlying trends behind his strikeouts. They saw a player who rarely made the same mistake twice, who began to recognize spin and who whiffed less often as the summer progressed.
When the pandemic shut down the sports world all the way through that year’s draft, teams were forced to make major decisions with a fraction of the usual information. Both The Athletic and Baseball America had Walker pegged for the late first round or early second, but the Cardinals had grown more enamored of him. He was big, strong and athletic. Committed to Duke, he was smart. They nabbed him at No. 21, paying him a just-under-slot-value bonus of $2.9 million to sign him.
Had it been a normal year, Flores thinks, “there’s a good chance he’s not there when we pick.” But it wasn’t. The Cardinals played an educated hunch to draft him, and Walker disappeared into the black box of the alternate site, continuing his development out of view. By the time he resurfaced to start the next season, he’d become the steal of the draft.
Walker needed only 27 games in Low A, a stretch on either side of his 18th birthday, to soar past expectations.
LaRocque likes to say that the game tells you what you need to know about a player, and baseball quickly communicated that Walker wasn’t being challenged. Most players get to a level and struggle at first, eventually catching up to the speed of competition. Walker, LaRocque says, “was ahead of the Florida State League in the first two weeks.” After Walker hit .374 with six home runs and a 1.162 OPS, the Cardinals bumped him up to High-A Peoria.
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He did it with a swing that appeared deceptively casual. In high school, Walker’s swing had been more effortful, with an exaggerated hand load and a big leg kick, but the Cardinals had worked to quiet those elements after he was drafted. (It took him a week, Steinhorn says.) He had never threatened to spin himself into the dirt — “He did not look like he was gripping the bat so hard that sawdust was coming out,” Flores says — but he didn’t need to work even that hard to get power. Now, Walker is shorter and more direct to the ball, a mere tap enough to send it skyward.
Walker has always worked harder than his swing suggests, though. Throughout the draft process, he determined for himself what kind of commitment would be enough to draw him away from college. “Honestly, his number was higher than our number,” says his father, Derek. Growing up, Walker and his siblings would deliver PowerPoint presentations to their parents about the prudence of purchasing certain items, like a hoverboard or an iPhone. Derek Walker remembers one that featured Walker and his sister in formal dress, with snacks provided on the table in the family’s home office. The pair got what they requested, the elder Walker says, “after we stopped laughing.”
So, while a great swing will get you far, it’s little surprise Walker also propelled himself through Double A by combining it with an advanced and studied approach. Though the slugger describes his offensive strategy in simple terms — “push the fastball oppo and try to see the offspeed” to pull, he says — Cardinals evaluators praise his attention to detail and game-planning. “If he gets fooled once,” Steinhorn says, “he doesn’t get fooled again.” His strikeout and walk rates were a better-than-average 21.6 percent and 10.8 percent, respectively, although his swinging strike rate of 16 percent in Double A stands as an outlier.
Walker was essentially slump-proof this year with Double-A Springfield, where he was younger than every single pitcher he faced. His worst month by OPS was April, when he posted an .817 mark, although he still batted .318. In no month did his average drop below .290. “I’ve absolutely felt challenged,” he insists, but his coaches aren’t so sure. Even at the alt site, where pitchers from the top of the farm system introduced him to pro ball, he was never overmatched. Steinhorn opts for a gentler verb. “He was learning,” the hitting instructor says. “He never really struggled at the time.”
Or since.
Early in the fall league, Walker uncorked a throw from right field. It wasn’t fast enough to get the runner at home, but that doesn’t mean it was slow. Statcast tracked it at 99.5 mph, one of the hardest throws from the outfield ever recorded.
Since moving to the outfield, Jordan Walker racked up a ridiculous number of assists at Double-A and has been unleashing missiles in the AFL, including this one at 99.5 mph — harder than any throw by a @Cardinals outfielder in the Statcast era.
More: https://t.co/pegLKJXK7D pic.twitter.com/iKuWF9x8se
— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) October 13, 2022
Playing on the grass is new territory for Walker, although it’s hardly an indictment of his work on the dirt. Despite his size, he was shaping up to be solid at third base, where he’d played until midway through this season. The Cardinals just happen to have Nolan Arenado, a perennial Gold Glover and MVP candidate, locked up long-term on the hot corner, so a position change seemed prudent.
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That throw opened Winn’s eyes — “I knew he had an arm, but that was something different,” the shortstop says — and sparked a competitiveness that exists between the teammates. At the Futures Game in July, Winn fired a ball to first at 100.5 mph, the fastest infield throw since Statcast began measuring them. If Walker is to surpass him, Winn says he’ll have to do it from the infield. “If I go out there” to the outfield, he adds, “I’d probably touch 105.” A former pitcher, Winn also insists he’d strike Walker out on three pitches.
“We’re always competing,” Walker says, their trash talk now conducted between the outfield and the infield. “We’ll see.”
Winn and Walker highlight what could be St. Louis’ best draft class in years. Slugger Alec Burleson, a second-rounder and the Cardinals’ fourth pick in the 2020 draft, has already reached the majors. Walker went in the first and Winn was taken at No. 54. Right-hander Tink Hence, also in the fall league and likely to debut on a few Top 100 lists ahead of next season, went 63rd.
The outfield move opens a path to the majors for Walker sooner than later. His arrival will complete an ascent so swift, his father has trouble believing it. Though he’s never doubted his son’s talent, it wasn’t that long ago that Walker was “the little runny-nosed kid who would run around the house bumping into walls.” The preteen who acted in videos, with surprisingly slick production values, directed by his older brother. (One, titled “The Showdown: Harry Potter Style,” is more than worth its two-and-a-half-minute runtime.) Or the boy he’d bring to Braves games, hoping to catch an up-close glimpse of Chipper Jones. Walker and Jones now share an agent.
“It’s just inconceivable that one day, hopefully soon, we’ll see him out at a major-league park,” his father says.
That day is not far off. The gift is under the tree. Flores and his scouts found it, LaRocque and his player development staff wrapped it, but it was Walker who sped up the calendar. “I just want to make the MLB team,” he says. Christmas in St. Louis is coming, one smashed baseball at a time.
(Photo: Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)
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