Jordan Walker Is Trending Up

Since the start of the year, I’ve been watching Jordan Walker mash the ball as I try to figure out something to say about it. As a card-carrying Walker booster – I’ve got a Top 50 Trade Value ranking to prove it – I’m very willing to believe in Walker’s promise. But as a sometime Cardinals fan – being a professional baseball writer makes fandom complicated – I’m afraid of getting burned. Walker has already gone from one of the most heralded prospects in the game to one of its worst-performing full-time players. Now he’s one of the best-performing players? Being a little skeptical is just a matter of self-preservation.

Now that we’re a month and a half into the season, though, I can’t keep myself from investigating. Walker hasn’t had stretches this productive since his rookie year. He hasn’t had stretches where he’s hit the ball on the ground this rarely as a major leaguer, period. He’s been 14.5 runs above average offensively in 2026 – after being 13 runs below average offensively for his entire career before now. If that isn’t screaming for an article, I don’t know what is.

If you know two things about Walker, they’re probably these: He swings hard, and he can’t get the ball off the ground. That makes it easy to think through how he might improve: keep swinging hard and stop hitting it on the ground. When I designed the Squared-Up Explorer for the FanGraphs Lab, Walker was actually one of my favorite examples to use. Look at where his best swings are, compared to another guy who swings very hard:

The bubble size represents frequency, and being further right means more squared-up contact. Before 2026, Walker squared up the ball most frequently on grounders, and he hit a ton of them. For his part, Judge isn’t squaring the ball up every time he hits it or anything, but he’s following a simple recipe. He swings really hard, he gets the ball in the air a lot, and then he profits. The harder you swing, the more valuable hitting the ball flush becomes; Judge doesn’t need to hit it pure every time to clobber dingers at a historic rate.

That’s a common plan for sluggers who get the job done with raw power. Guys like Walker and Judge get so much value out of squaring the ball up in the air that they don’t need to do it all that often to prosper. With the help of a little bit of algorithmic smoothing so that three years can fit on a single graph without too much clutter, you can see how Walker has mostly failed to launch, aside from an abbreviated 2024 season (178 plate appearances sandwiched around a three-month demotion to Triple-A):

Some of Walker’s 2026 improvement can be directly attributed to correcting this long-time issue. As Daniel Epstein detailed a month ago, Walker took a trip to Driveline this winter and worked on a mechanical flaw that he believed was holding him back. His back hip collapsed too frequently, preventing him from elevating the ball. The fix? Stop doing that, basically. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that’s what it boils down to.

It’s entirely plausible that making that change is doing a lot of work for Walker, but frankly, I’m not really a hitting mechanics guy. It’s not that I don’t believe in them – it’s pretty clear that how you swing the bat matters. But I’ve never been able to turn that into analytical insight, because hitters can swing a ton of different ways and still succeed. I’m more of an outcomes guy. I used the Squared-Up Explorer to see how Walker is doing in 2026:

Wait, what?! That’s just 2025 repeated. What the heck? Well, the reason they look so similar is because these smoothed lines remove the frequency bubbles. Walker’s big change hasn’t been about adjusting where he squares up the ball most often. It’s been about prioritizing getting the ball in the air even if he doesn’t catch it clean every time:

There’s no getting around the fact that Walker’s swing produces groundball rockets. But the problem with his elevated contact wasn’t just that he didn’t square it up frequently enough – it was also that he didn’t hit the ball in the air at all. In 2025, a whopping 53% of his contact was hit at 10 degrees or lower, one of the worst marks in baseball. You can succeed as a slugger while doing that, but only if you do a lot of other things very well – Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and James Wood both hit a similar number of grounders, but they both got much more out of their fly ball contact than Walker.

This year, Walker has left the company of Guerrero and started putting balls in the air at a clip that gives him more room for error (Wood is doing this too, which explains his impressive power output). Only 40% of his batted balls are hit at 10 degrees or lower, which is actually lower than the league average. Now, is he squaring up all of those balls? He is not – he’s only squaring up 57% of his elevated contact, about 10 percentage points below league average. But that’s much higher than the results he’s managed before this year, and again, he swings really hard.

Here’s a simplified way of thinking about the different types of contact Walker has made in his career:

Sometimes wOBA can be hard to wrap your head around. What about slugging percentage?

That simple transition to hitting grounders a little less often, and hitting the ball on the nose a little more often when he gets it in the air, is worth nearly 100 points of slugging (on contact) on its own. It can’t explain all of Walker’s improvement, but it helps explain why he had never posted even average production on contact before this year and is suddenly a standout in that category.

In fact, I’ve been downplaying his improvement by using this framing. It’s not just that Walker is getting the ball in the air more frequently, and it’s not just that he’s squaring it up more frequently when he hits it in the air; even his squared-up contact has gotten much better. Those numbers are career averages, but his bat speed has never been higher on balls he lifts, he’s never hit the ball harder when he squares it up in the air, and he’s never produced at a clip even approaching this year’s mark. The 2026 version of Walker looks right at home next to the biggest-hitting sluggers in the game. Here’s a list of the five most productive hitters in 2026 on balls that they square up in the air:

On raw physical tools alone, Walker obviously belongs on this list. He swings as hard as these dudes, and we’re already restricting it to elevated contact that he made at least solid contact with. But he just wasn’t truly tapping into his power. If you’re wondering how that can happen after we already restrict it to squared-up contact, it’s because “squared up” means hit at 80% or higher of the maximum theoretical velocity. That’s a broad range. Walker’s best contact is just better than it used to be, in addition to being more frequent.

How’s he doing it? That back hip adjustment surely plays a part; his old mechanics clearly weren’t working for him. But again, I’m not really a mechanics guy, so I’ll turn my focus elsewhere, towards the types of pitches he’s unloading on. Walker has never seen fastballs at the top of the zone at a higher rate. He’s already put 18 in play, nearly a career high – he notched 25 balls in play in 2023 in roughly triple the plate appearances. And he’s elevated 14 of those 18, another career high. That’s right: Walker has never lifted more high fastballs in a single season than he has this season, and it’s May 13.

Another major change: Walker is handling sliders very differently than he used to. His current plan doesn’t seem particularly complex to me, but I absolutely love it. If you throw Walker a slider below the strike zone, he probably won’t hit it. He’s whiffing about three quarters of the time when he offers at those, and he still chases a decent amount. But if you throw him a slider in the zone, you might as well tell your outfielders to turn around and get moving, because Walker is going to try to deposit it in the seats. He’s taking ferocious hacks against in-zone spin. He’s lifting and pulling the ball at a career-best clip, and not by a narrow margin. Slower stuff is exactly what you want to pull – it’s slower, so your swing tends to meet the ball further out in front and angled more to pull. Only Dalton Rushing is doing more damage against in-zone breaking balls this year.

The bottom line of all of this analysis is that Walker basically looks like the hitter scouts saw when he was one of the top prospects in the game before his 2023 debut. He’s enormous. He swings preposterously hard. He swings and misses fairly often, as you’d expect with such a big swing. He makes too much of his best contact on the ground, but when he does put it in the air, he’s capable of hitting it a very long way. None of that is new, and none of that seems likely to change anytime soon.

But that should add up to a good hitter! The boppers he shares the top of the swing speed leaderboard with all have a lot of the same flaws and a lot of the same strengths, and for the most part they’re very good hitters. Walker wasn’t struggling because he didn’t have the tools to succeed. He was struggling despite those tools. No one who’s watched Jordan Walker turn on a high fastball is surprised that he has 11 homers this year; they’re surprised that he only had 11 in his last two big league seasons combined.

That makes a forward-looking evaluation very difficult, and to be honest with you, I don’t know what the future holds here. Walker has befuddled me for so long now that I’m going to be very careful about making predictions. But I do feel comfortable saying this: Nothing Walker is doing right now looks particularly unsustainable. I don’t mean that he’ll keep posting a 169 wRC+ indefinitely – if you want to dig in, there’s plenty to nitpick, and I think it’s inarguable that he’s on a heater at the moment. But in terms of process, what’s not to like here? Plenty of guys who approach the game roughly like 2026 Walker are elite hitters. Would you be surprised if he carries a 140 wRC+ the rest of the way? I certainly wouldn’t; that’s a reasonable mark for a player who does this much damage when he connects and has a solid sense of the strike zone, even if that solid sense of the strike zone comes with plenty of whiffs.

In fact, the only real blemish in Walker’s 2026 season is one he can’t fix yet: He hasn’t done it for long enough. If he had played like this for the last three years, we wouldn’t be wondering about whether this strange style could work; we’d be talking about how many zeroes the Cardinals would be putting on a contract extension. New Walker? He’s awesome. There’s no argument. I’m excited to see him try to keep it going while pitchers go from marveling at how a guy built like this can’t put the ball in the air to feverishly plotting an escape from his reign of home run terror.