Inner Half

This is a story about a baseball player, but, first, I want to talk about golf.

A near-universal experience for a golfer comes not on the physical course, but on the mental island that most cast themselves in exile to after inevitable mistakes or bad luck. 

If you have golfed in your life, you can likely picture this: You’re several holes through your round. You’re tired, sweaty, and when you’re not standing next to your ball thinking about how you got to this terrible spot or how you’re going to hit this ball straight off the tee box, you’re thinking about the first sip of your post-round adult beverage. 

You don’t have the energy to think about your swing anymore and the pressure is off to shoot a personal-best you probably never had a chance at in the first place. You swing… and it’s perfect. It’s straight as an arrow because you didn’t swing out of your shoes or try to guide it on a certain flight path into the fairway. You submitted yourself to the inevitable, natural, heartbreaking ways the beautiful game of golf may take you down. You thought less. 

You thought less because you can only control what you can control, which is being confident in your swing, technically-sound or not. You thought less, and you did more.

A given baseball hitter must grapple with similar mental warfare as a golfer might. In their case, however, they have another human throwing the ball as hard as they possibly can on a trajectory they must guess before swinging their bat, which makes hitting significantly harder for the baseball hitter than the golfer, who hits a stationary ball off of a tee or the ground where their ball comes to rest.

St. Louis Cardinals right fielder Jordan Walker may be the poster-child of thinking less and doing more. The 6’6”, 250-pound 24-year-old was drafted by the St. Louis organization in the 1st round in 2020 to be an intimidating right-handed hitter in the middle of their order for years and years to come. 

In 2026, Walker is that player. He’s hitting well, getting on base, and slugging for power. Jordan Walker is a star and will, in all likelihood, be awarded an All-Star Game appearance in July.  

Why am I telling you this? Well, because just last year in 2025, Jordan Walker’s performance was so poor, he and the greater baseball world didn’t know if he had any hope to be an MLB player.

2019-2023 Jordan Walker is the Future of Baseball

Jordan Walker was a stud in high school (in terms of his performance on the baseball field, anyways). 

The 6’5”, 220-pound 18-year-old from Decatur won the 2019-20 Georgia Gatorade Player of Year after hitting for a .457 batting average and 1.555 OPS (on-base percentage + slugging percentage) with 4 home runs in just 16 games of a COVID-shortened senior season. The summer before his senior year saw him win Player of the Game honors at the 2019 MLB High-School All-Star Game and participate in the MLB High School Home Run Derby during All-Star week at Progressive Field in Cleveland.

Given that context, when the Cardinals drafted Walker in 2020 and subsequently offered him $2.9 million to forgo his commitment to Duke University’s baseball program, few could doubt their decision. Especially so when Walker, playing in his first professional baseball game with the Palm Beach Cardinals of Single-A baseball, banged a home run on the first pitch he saw. 27 games later, he had been promoted to the organization’s High-A (A+) minor-league team, the Peoria Chiefs.

Between Palm Beach and Peoria, Walker played 82 games and had 366 plate appearances. He hit for a .317 batting average and a .936 OPS, launching 14 home runs and stealing 14 bases, something players his size aren’t typically able to do. Following 2021, MLB Pipeline (MLB’s official prospect and draft coverage brand) wrote this blurb about Jordan Walker:

MLB Pipeline: “Walker has easy bat speed and frequently posts exit velocities over 100 mph. The power potential is obvious, but the big frame creates a naturally long swing and there are questions about his ability to hit breaking balls. While there is some swing and miss in his game, he did show an improved ability to make contact in 2021. With a strong work ethic and willingness to learn, he should hit enough to be able to produce the desired power numbers.”

The hype was building. Prior to 2022, Walker had risen to become MLB Pipeline’s 30th ranked prospect in all of baseball. Baseball America (a publication that also produces a reputable list of annual top prospects) had ranked him 24th. 

Walker had been promoted to Double-A (AA), where he spent the entirety of the 2022 campaign. In 119 games and 536 plate appearances, he hit for a .306 batting average and an .898 OPS, ripping 19 home runs and 31 doubles, and driving in 68 RBI. His rise to MLB was now all but guaranteed.

Going into 2023, Walker was lauded as the 4th-best prospect in all of baseball by both MLB Pipeline and Baseball America. Deemed ready for the bright lights and the stage that is Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Walker made the Opening Day roster with the big league Cardinals.

Turns out those bright lights didn’t faze the 20-year-old. Walker opened his rookie season with a 12-game hit streak (registering a hit in 12 straight games), matching an MLB record for a player of his age. He collected 20 hits in his first 20 games, a feat to be ecstatic about for a 20-year-old, right? Well, the Cardinals sent him down to AAA after 20 games of a .274 batting average and a .718 OPS. He hadn’t slugged much for extra bases (he had hit just 2 home runs and 3 doubles) and had been limited to single-hit performances 12 times of his 16 games in which he recorded a hit.

Back down in AAA, he’d play 29 games in Memphis, recording a .239 batting average, .348 on-base percentage, and .398 slugging percentage (a .746 OPS), notably improving on his MLB strikeout (25.6%) and walk rates (3.8%) that he had had some trouble with in the bigs. Brought back to the MLB on June 2, Walker turned in an .802 OPS with 14 home runs, lowering his strikeout rate to 21.7% and raising his walks to an 8.8% rate. 

All in all, Jordan Walker showed why he was a top prospect and why he was deserving of his hype. At just 21 years old, he had shown he could hang with and produce versus the best pitchers in the world. The only direction was up, right?

2024-2025: The Nightmare

Unsurprisingly opening the 2024 season on the MLB, Jordan Walker seemed poised to take a big leap forward as the Cardinals’ next superstar. 20 games into the season (there’s that sample size again), on April 23, Walker finished the day with a season-line of a .155 batting average, a .239 OBP, a .259 SLG (.497 OPS), 0 home runs and a strikeout rate of about 27% through 67 plate appearances. A player whose calling card was his raw power was hitting the ball on the ground, rather than in the air, too often. His only saving grace may have been that his walks sat around that second-half-of-2023-rate of 8.9%. 

He was sent down to AAA, being deemed not good enough for MLB baseball a month after being seen as the next big star of it. What should’ve been a breakthrough season started to feel like a bad dream. 

Days, weeks, and months passed before Walker gained any sort of traction with his swing in Memphis. Then came late July/early August, where he began to hit the ball hard and produce results. The Cardinals brought him back to the team on the 12th of August, just as the club was working on a playoff push in the National League.

Given a runway to play every day for the Cardinals down the stretch in 2024, Walker had a chance to prove himself once again. September was a key month for him. He began the month with a 5-hit performance against the Yankees that included a home run and 3 RBI. 25 games and 91 plate appearances saw him deliver the power he was destined to unleash: .494 slugging percentage on 5 home runs and 6 doubles that month. The same problems still lingered, though.

From August 12 to September 29 (the last game of the season), Walker played in 31 games and had 111 plate appearances. He struck out 32 times (28.8% K%) and walked just 4 times (3.6% BB%). He failed to record a hit in 12 of those games. 

A slight bit of promise flared, to be sure, but something was off in 2024. It was almost as if he was trying to do too much. He could hit the ball hard, but he couldn’t hit the ball up. His 9.4 degree launch angle average showed that. His 50% groundball rate meant exactly what you think it meant. 

Things didn’t get better, either. Fast forward to 2025 and the Cardinals have given Walker another chance. 

Another chance wasted, that is. 47 games in, at the end of May, Walker held just a .583 OPS. More of the same. A wrist issue at the end of May and, of all things, appendicitis at the end of June saw him land on the injured list a couple of times in the first few months of 2025. The tail end of 2025 wasn’t any better than the front end. 

What could the Cardinals do? They had a physical specimen who, at just 23, had struggled so bad he failed to resemble the slugger they had drafted just five years ago. He was now 279 games into his MLB career and held a career OPS of .680, 11% below league average. His -2.6 WAR represented the fact that he had cost his team 2.6 wins over his career. That he had provided negative value as a whole. Could they trust him to provide a miracle revival? Did he believe that he had that in himself? 2026 would likely be his final proving ground in St. Louis.

2026: A New Player

Walker was given another chance because the Cardinals’ front office still believed in his raw abilities. A rough Spring Training didn’t help matters: He hit for a .205 average and a .528 OPS, striking out 34% of the time. Those results weren’t promising, so Walker got in the hitting lab. Walker himself said that the goal was to slow things down in the batter’s box and be ready for any pitch coming to the plate. He must be able to react and hit any pitch in any direction. A pull-heavy hitter prior to this, Walker had generated a ton of power throughout his career, but limited his versatility with a pull approach, especially against major league pitchers, who were smart enough to exploit his one-dimensionalness.

Walker said, “We went over our plan. I went in there with [assistant hitting coach] Casey Chenoweth. … I started hitting off the machine, not thinking much about mechanics at all. I took a few good swings off the machine, and Casey said, ‘It was that simple,’ even though hitting isn’t that simple, but I need to keep it simple for myself. … It got to a point where I was hitting the ball the way I wanted to hit it. We kept doing drills, which sped up my mind. I had to eliminate my thought process. I think that is kind of what helps. I try to take that into the game. Think less and hit more.”

Think less and hit more.

Just as the philosophy might help you stripe a drive down the center of the fairway with little to no effort, so too does it help Jordan Walker improve his results at the plate. 

2026 has seen Walker leap from a career question-mark to a no-doubt star. He holds an OPS of .859, 42% above league average. He’s top-10 in both hits (90) and top-20 in home runs (18). He’s also top-20 in bWAR (Baseball-Reference’s Wins Above Replacement), which means he has a strong overall impact on helping his team win baseball games (which they have: at 43-38, they sit in 3rd place in the strong NL Central division).

It’s been remarkable, miraculous even, that Walker has been able to flip the script of his young career. Still just 24, he will enter the first of three arbitration years before he’s scheduled to reach free agency after the 2029 season. For now, the Cardinals will reap the benefits of trusting Jordan Walker to develop and believing in the player they saw the potential in when he was just 18 years old. Although he’s not the first example of a career 180 turnaround, he’s the most recent and therefore, the most exciting. Let’s hope it continues.