This Article Is Not About a Hitting Streak
Jordan Walker, the Cardinals’ phenomenal young outfielder, is off to a scintillating start to the season. In his first 10 games, he’s hitting an impressive .326/.370/.512, comfortably better than league average. The Cardinals promoted Walker to the majors despite a positional logjam, and he’s done nothing to make their job easier; he looks like a foundational part of their future. And oh yeah, maybe you’ve heard, he’s on quite the hitting streak.
You probably didn’t come here for a lecture from me, but here’s a quick one about hitting streaks. I think they’re really cool. I think it’s amazing that Walker is now in second place for the longest hitting streak to start a career for players under 21 years old, and that he passed Ted Williams for that honor. That’s awesome, and I’m sure that he’ll treasure that memory for years to come. Eleven games! It’s truly amazing. I just don’t think it’s useful for my purposes, which is to wonder how good Jordan Walker is. Here’s one example of a hit that kept Walker’s streak alive, the sole hit he recorded on April 3:
That’s clearly a hit, and I’d even say that it’s a good piece of hitting. What does it have to do with how well Walker is adjusting to the majors? Not much, I’d venture to say. The streak is a tremendous achievement, it’s super cool, and I don’t think it’s worth mentioning beyond that.
With that out of the way, I have two burning questions about Walker: how are teams pitching him, and how is he responding to it? It’s hard to overstate Walker’s raw power. He’s a mountain of a man, 6-foot-6 and muscular, and he’s wasted no time demonstrating that power in the big leagues. He’s in the 97th percentile for maximum exit velocity; in other words, he hits the ball hard. He’s also in the 92nd percentile for hard-hit rate; he’s hitting the ball hard consistently. That informs both the ideal strategy to use against him and his own response.
Thus far, pitchers aren’t treating Walker with kid gloves, power notwithstanding. He’s seen fastballs on 61% of first pitches, right in line with the overall league average. Pitchers aren’t challenging him excessively in the strike zone (52% zone rate, bang on league average), but they’re hardly treating him like Aaron Judge. I think that makes a lot of sense, to be honest: if I were a pitcher, I’d be trying to get Walker into disadvantageous counts so that I could use my secondary pitches.
Walker is countering this strategy by being incredibly aggressive. He’s swinging at 46% of first pitches overall, and at a 58% rate when they’re in the strike zone. That’s a great decision; you’re not supposed to feed someone like Walker fastballs in the strike zone, and he seems to be focusing on striking when those pitches are most likely. Eric Lauer learned that the hard way:
It’s not all sunshine and lollipops for Walker, though. The Brewers had success throwing him first pitch sliders in the zone, and the Rockies have intermittently tried the same plan. At only 20 and with no experience above Double-A before this year, he hasn’t seen a lot of big league-caliber breaking balls. He’s coming up empty on 36% of his swings against breaking balls despite making solid swing decisions against them; he sports a 31% chase rate against curves and sliders, which is roughly the major league average. Again, that’s coming from a 20-year-old who is facing major league pitching for the first time.
That chase rate answers one question that you might wonder about from his minuscule walk rate: it doesn’t look like pitchers will be able to throw him junk outside of the strike zone and avoid challenging him. Or at least, that’s true depending on your definition of junk. Walker hasn’t seen a ton of changeups so far, but he’s chased them at an above-average rate, and he’s swung often at fastballs above the top of the zone too.
That’s the early book on Walker: attack him high and inside with fastballs. He’s yet to chase a single fastball away; instead, he’s targeting pitches inside that he can turn on. Take a look at all of his fastball chases so far this year:
That’s the kind of decision-making that Walker showed in the minors as well, and he’s consistently turned it into loud contact. It’s hard to say that those swings at inside fastballs give pitchers an easy out – sure, if you can put it there, Walker might chase, but if you leave it over the inside edge, he’s liable to crush it. He’s very good at getting his hands around and pulling inside fastballs, and letting Walker pull a fastball is the last thing that pitchers facing him want to do.
It’s too early in the season to read much into statistics, even process-driven ones like chase rate and in-zone swing rate. Despite that, I feel comfortable saying that Walker won’t be blown away by major league pitching. He has a fair bit of swing-and-miss in him, and he probably can’t keep running a 15.2% swinging strike rate while only striking out 19.6% of the time. But he’s not chasing wildly or falling victim to the same pitch over and over; he’s simply a power-on-contact marvel who sacrifices some contact to get to it.
If you’re looking for an admittedly optimistic comparison, consider Julio Rodríguez, another top prospect who reached the majors in his age-21 season (Walker will turn 21 next month). Like Walker, Rodríguez has an expansive but hardly irresponsible approach at the plate. Rodríguez also swings through his fair share of pitches in pursuit of scalded contact. In fact, Walker’s first 11 games look a lot like Julio’s first season in the majors, with the strikeouts and walks both turned down a bit:
| Batter | O-Swing% | Z-Swing% | Contact% | SwStr% | BB% | K% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jordan Walker | 38.9% | 75.4% | 71.9% | 15.2% | 2.2% | 19.6% |
| Julio Rodríguez, 2022 | 37.1% | 71.4% | 71.2% | 14.4% | 7.1% | 25.9% |
So is Walker the next Julio Rodríguez, destined for stardom and an eight-figure contract? I wouldn’t go that far, for multiple reasons. First, Rodríguez is a good defender at a premium position. Walker might yet turn into a great right fielder – he’s fast and has a cannon arm – but he’s new to the outfield and still looks unsettled out there. If you’re worried not about whether his bat will play in the big leagues – I think this question has already been answered – but whether Walker will produce like a star going forward, defensive (and baserunning) value matters.
Next, there’s the sample size issue, which almost goes without saying. If Walker hits like this all year, great! It’ll take, well, all year to find that out, though. Walker’s overall offensive numbers are great, but they’re unsustainable in a ton of different ways. He’ll walk more, he’ll run a lower BABIP, and he’ll probably strike out more. A full-season line might end up with a similar wRC+, but there’s a lot of baseball to be played before then.
The last worry sign is perhaps also the most important. A game plan of swinging really hard and doing a lot of damage when you make contact clearly works in the major leagues; plenty of great hitters, Rodríguez included, use it to great effect. To really make that plan sing, however, you need to put the ball in the air when you make contact. Thus far, Walker has been hitting more grounders than you can shake a stick at, and that’s going to be a problem if he can’t turn it around.
Walker has put 34 balls in play in his short major league career, and 19 of them have been grounders. That’s a disastrous ratio, and while he’s still doing plenty of damage on contact, hitting for Walker’s level of power with so many grounders is an impossible balance to strike. He’s produced a gaudy .674 wOBA when he puts the ball in the air, a mark that would have ranked sixth in the majors last season – and yet only a .455 wOBA on contact overall, which would have ranked in the back end of the top 20.
That’s still elite production on contact, but you can see the problem: the low-value grounders drag down the truly impressive contact he’s producing when he puts the ball in the air. Given that Walker will probably strike out a fair amount, maximizing damage when he makes contact is imperative.
With all that said, should Cardinals fans be worried? I don’t think so. We’re talking about a 34-batted-ball sample here, not a year of futility. Walker’s minor league batted ball distribution was roughly normal, and he doesn’t appear to have changed his swing to start punching the ball into the ground. He’s not swinging too much at low pitches or exclusively hunting sinkers.
Want another way of thinking about it? Paul Goldschmidt, who won the NL MVP last season on the back of his frequent and loud air contact, had three non-overlapping 11-game stretches where he posted a groundball rate of 55% or higher. Judge has had five such stretches in the past two years. Even fly ball hitters go through grounder-heavy periods.
If you’re wondering when to start worrying about whether the grounders will stick with Walker to his detriment, the correct answer is “right now, but only a little bit.” Obviously, I’d feel better about his likelihood of avoiding a fate similar to that of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in his first few years in the league, wasting exit velocity on grounders, if he were launching everything in the air.
But if you’re wondering how worried to be, I’ll say this: I don’t start paying much attention to groundball or fly ball rate – for hitters specifically – until roughly 80 balls in play, 30 games or so into a season. I picked that number based on an old but indispensable Russell Carleton article. That’s the 50% reliability point for groundball rate, which means, very approximately, that half noise and half skill produced that result. It doesn’t mean that rate will persist forever, or that it’s a good estimate of a player’s true talent. It just means that by 80 balls in play, you can start to be certain that something the player is doing is contributing to their results, rather than just statistical noise.
What does that mean for Walker? It means that it’s too soon to know what it means. That’s an unsatisfying answer, I know, but it’s an honest one. It’s April 12. There’s still a lot of baseball to be played. In two weeks, Walker will have doubled his major league track record. In a month, he will have tripled it. The early returns on Walker are promising: he has the light-tower raw power we all expected and isn’t getting overwhelmed by big league bendy stuff. How will that translate into a batting line? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
I was looking at Walker’s hot zones last night. The problem with attacking him “high and inside with fastballs” is getting the ball outside the strike zone. Those three blocks inside the strike zone are where he’s getting the most hits.
Small sample-size and all, Walker is a welcome sight for Cardinals fans.
Awesome! Loved the Carleton article, but 50% he used seems blatantly arbitrary. Who am I to say? I don’t even know why you need 30 samples to engage the central limit theorem. I wonder how academic creds of the genes can be entered into regressions. As a shamelessly biased Cardinal fan, I’m just happy about the outcome of those genes and Mr. Walker’s choice of baseball over other, arguably sexier, sports. Could you imagine him as a soccer goalie?
Or a tight end?
So the book on Jordan Walker before was that he has long arms with huge power, has a lot of strikeouts, and he hits the ball on the ground too much. It’s hard to tell what’s going on from this article, but he always struck me as a player who often has to choose between hitting a ball at an suboptimal angle and not hitting the ball at all. Guys of this size and with this sort of power have a lot of blessings, but they tend to have to pick their poison about what their weaknesses are, even if they become superstars. Giancarlo Stanton and Joey Gallo were like this for most of their careers, and Aaron Judge was like this until last year when he ascended to baseball immortality. Lesser versions of this archetype exist in Domingo Santana, Nathaniel Lowe, Miguel Sano, Jorge Soler, Alec Bohm, Franmil Reyes, Jose Martinez, and Eric Hosmer.
(There is one guy who has beaten this definitively, and it’s Yordan Alvarez. Yordan Alvarez is a monster. He doesn’t have to pick and choose; his hit tool is so advanced he can do it all. The pure opposite of Yordan Alvarez is Jorge Alfaro. You can think of those as the endpoints of what is logically possible for Jordan Walker. Aaron Judge is not a logical endpoint).
If you had to force me to guess what Walker’s career looks like, it doesn’t seem like he’s going to be choosing lifting the ball and striking out a lot like Gallo or Stanton. He has that kind of potential, but he’s more like Domingo Santana or Jose Martinez or Eric Hosmer–huge guys who hit the ball hard but don’t hit it over the fence as much as you expect. But he’s so much younger than they were when they debuted, and he’s already performing like the peak version of those guys. So it’s easy to imagine him improving from here, becoming a better version of those guys–one who hits more consistently than they did.
Why does lifting the pitch imply huge strikeouts? Most obviously Nolan Arenado had the lowest GB% in 2022 with 12% K. 2nd lowest Eduardo Escobar 24%. The connection isn’t obvious to me.
I read this comment yesterday and didn’t think much about the Jose Martinez comparison, but reading it again, I think that makes a lot of sense. Martinez’s 2017 and 2018 are reasonable projections for Walker’s better seasons — just subtract a few points of OBP and add a few to SLG.
I think you could imagine Walker putting up lines very similar to either of those years every year in his 20s. Defensively, he’s got a chance to be much better (although he isn’t at the moment).
Going with my tried-and-true tzZiPs visual model of gut checking visual comps, I see Walker as the kind of unicorn who could contend for a batting title with a very high K rate and also hit a good share of homers despite a high GB/FB ratio. So ignoring his long-term defensive position for now and focusing on big strong RHBs, I’d say that Jordan Walker’s 80-90th percentile comp as a hitter is Andres Gallaraga.
(Though being just 20, he could become anything from a lower-power Richie Sexson to a full-fledged clone of Dave Winfield.)
SSS but he’s a recent position-changer (3B -> OF) and neither looking nor measuring well at all defensively. As a Cards fan I’m more concerned about that than the stick.
If he hits, they’ll find a position for him, even if his future is as a primary DH. There’s also the possibility that Arenado leaves once his contract is up and allows Walker (or Gorman) to move back to 3B at that point.
Arenado is under contact until 2028, and Walker will be a free agent in 2029. It’s more likely Walker takes over 1B after Goldschmidt leaves/retires/becomes a primary DH
That still leaves a minimum of one year he can play 3B and even more if he eventually signs an early career extension.
As for 1B, he’s even less familiar with that position than he is with RF right now, and not every 3B/OF can learn to play 1B decently. The odds are that he’ll improve enough in the OF that he’ll be better off sticking there than learning yet another new position when 1B opens up, at which point the Cardinals may have another option ready to take the reigns at 1B anyway or simply sign Goldy to another extension.
Even if Walker’s OF defense doesn’t develop, there are plenty of star players and even Hall of Famers like Lou Brock who have played decent or worse defense at non-premium positions. It’s just that both kinds of WAR overrate defensive value compared to offensive value.
Maybe defense is slightly overrated, but Walker looks horrendous out there. It’ll be difficult to keep playing him in the outfield with league-worst defense (well, second-worst in MLB in DRS and Fangraph’s Def rating, for whatever the small sample is worth).
So he moves to DH if necessary or perhaps back to 3B once Arenado’s contract is up. That doesn’t make what I said any less true.
If he defense develops only enough to where he’s merely playable in RF, it’ll be worth putting him out there on a regular basis to get his bat in the lineup, and he could still wind up as a deserving perennial All-Star if he becomes a good enough hitter.
Arenado will be playing third base for nearly all of Walker’s first six years, so a move to third probably doesn’t make sense. It’d be more likely he plays first base. I have no judgment for if he can handle first base, but I know his outfield defense is terrible.
I’m not sure comparing him to Brock makes sense — was Brock the league’s worst defender? I know he was pretty bad, but it’s hard to imagine he played like Walker has for that many years and never got moved to another position. No one is saying that Walker can’t make an All-Star team with his current offensive output, just that he could be more valuable anywhere other than the outfield. It’s worth noting that the move to the outfield isn’t rare; the players usually don’t look like Walker has.
In a way, it’s too bad that Walker’s “stuck” on a contending team right now – if he were playing for the A’s, he’d have a couple of years to show whether he could learn to play the outfield or if he has Hanley Ramirez Syndrome for real.
Walker could easily wind up signing an early career extension, and if not, that still leaves one year he could play 3B.
Brock may not have been the league’s worst defender, but he was still a Hall of Famer who played below average defense in LF. Meanwhile, it’s highly unlikely that Walker will remain as bad as he is in RF for long. All Walker needs to do is improve his OF defense to where he’s at least playable out there like Brock was, and it’s perfectly fine to leave him in the outfield long-term if necessary.
Juan Soto has entered the chat
On the positive side there are examples of batters who learned to hit hard fly balls like JD Martinez and Josh Donaldson. They weren’t as tall but I’m not sure how much that matters
Walker’s percentage of hitting grounders through 11 games is 57%, but it was 42% and 45% in his last two stops in the minors, so it could be just a small sample size aberration.
To me the he’s about as likely to hit 35% grounders as 55%
Many excellent points and observations, thanks.
Regarding the hitting streak itself, some of us remain of the opinion that if Joe Dimaggio had done what he did while playing in Cleveland, we might still not know who holds the record. Like hitting for the cycle, a hitting streak seems more a statistical curiosity than a measure of hitting skills.
Ha, “some of us.” I respectfully disagree. It’s not some obscure record made famous by NY fame. It’s one of the most known and iconic records in the sport, owned by one of the best hitters the game has seen. And it certainly shouldn’t be compared to a one game feat like hitting for the cycle. Fittingly, MLB makes a big deal about any hitter who even comes close.Most of the top 10 hitting streaks are owned by amazing hitters – DiMaggio, Keeler, Rose, Sisler, Cobb, Molitor, Rollins…
Even more remarkable, if that is possible, after the 56 game hit streak was broken, DiMaggio went on to get a hit in the next 15 games in a row. And he had a 61 game hitting streak with the San Francisco Seals in the PCL in in 1933.
That’s true enough, but it’s also true that DiMaggio is very overrated for having that hitting streak and playing in New York. For one thing, he never should’ve won AL MVP in 1941 over Ted Williams.
Overall, though part of it was due to his military service significantly cutting into his counting numbers, I don’t think he’s the inner circle Hall of Famer that most people make him out to be (still a very deserving regular Hall member, though). If not for the Streak and playing in the Big Apple, I doubt he gets into the Hall on his first ballot.
I’d have to disagree. Career .325 avg, .398 OBP, .579 slugging…over 13 seasons. 369 career strikeouts! Centerpiece of a team that won 9 rings! I care not for individual MVP awards – like who cares, really? But Joe D is definitely a 1st ballot hall guy in my opinion. I think people credit this NY fame / bias a bit too much. But that rings hollow if you can’t back it up with some stats. It’s Joe DiMaggio! Like, what’s the argument AGAINST him? “He played in NY” is not a convincing one. You can’t ding a guy for being extra famous. But then again, we don’t have to convince each other of anything.
You’re cherry-picking his best stats, and 13 seasons isn’t that good for a first ballot pick. His counting stats significantly lag behind most other first ballot position players from after the dead-ball era, even after accounting for the years he missed in the military.
I forget who said it, and while there’s a lot of hyperbole to the statement, there’s also a good amount of truth to it, as well: “If Stan Musial played in New York and Joe DiMaggio played in St. Louis, nobody would’ve heard of Joe DiMaggio.”
Not cherry picking his best stats, just citing his RATE stats. Since you already mentioned the war years, there was no reason for me to re-explain the gap there in counting statistics. And again, you’ve not cited anything except that he played in NY, thereby garnering more fame than he deserved. Sorry, but that’s not a convincing or coherent argument for anything. And it reads more like you ding players for playing where they are, just as you say others credit players for same. If anything, you’re expressing an anti-NY bias, but without any statistical citations or proof. Musial was terrific, amazing, fantastic and one of the best hitters who ever lived. What the heck does that have to do with how we perceive Joe D? I mean, I’m willing to be convinced, but it takes something other than “well, he played in NY.” But to each his own I guess.
Hyperbole or not, that statement is completely ridiculous. Joe D is top 15 all-time in slugging percentage. He is objectively one of the best hitters of all-time. Not to mention the fact that he probably lost ~500 hits and 100 HRs due to military service.
To some extent, DiMaggio being overrated is probably true, because every player who played for the Yankees is a bit overrated. Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams were overrated because they played in NY. So was Derek Jeter, but to a lesser extent. The only player I can think of who definitely was not overrated for the Yankees was Mickey Mantle, who was somehow just as good as the legends made him out to be. Maybe Aaron Judge, but who know what everyone will cook up about him 10 years from now.
But specifically Joe DiMaggio? He did marry Marilyn Monroe, that’s probably part of the story. He did play for the Yankees. He also wasn’t as good as Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle but has a strong claim to be in the next tier down of the greatest CFers of all time. But he has one of the most unusual records in all of baseball history. It’s got the weird property of (1) being just barely within reach so that people get a chance to talk about it every other season and (2) otherwise being so far out of reach that nobody will ever break it.
If you compare the streak to, say, Cal Ripken Jr’s consecutive games streak…Ripken’s streak is way more impressive. But it’s so impressive that we don’t ever get a chance to talk about it. No one will ever come close to breaking that streak, so it will never come up. DiMaggio’s streak is just barely attainable enough for it to come up, but otherwise so far out of reach it still leaves us in awe.
(All that said, I am pretty confident that if DiMaggio had played in Baltimore and Ripken for NYY, and Ripken married Marilyn Monroe and DiMaggio didn’t, we would talk more about Ripken and less about DiMaggio. But maybe not enough for it to matter)
If Cal Ripken had married Marilyn Monroe, we would definitely, absolutely talk about him more. There’s never been a necrophile nearly that successful in baseball before.
I prefer to think of her being undead in this scenario, like a vampire. Age 36 forever, she drinks the blood of Orioles batboys to keep herself looking young and healthy.
But it really seems like there is literally no woman who is as legendary in Ripken’s generation as Monroe was in hers, right? Marilyn Monroe is potentially the greatest pop culture icon of all time in the US. The only woman in Ripken’s generation that even comes close is Madonna.
In which case, she’d be better off being married to Nanodracula…
To me Derek Jeter is more overrated than Posada or Williams, just because of compiling stats and celebrity. He’s often listed as an all time great just a hair below Ruth and Gehrig when he’s actually more like Luke Appling
Actually clearly worse than Appling. More like Eddie Murray
One thing I find very ironic is that there’s actually a cohort of Yankees that might be a bit underrated – the 70’s Yankees not named Reggie or Catfish. There’s a plethora of Hall of Very Good players (Munson, Nettles, Randolph, White) who weren’t Steinbrenner FA acquisitions, and they tend to be overshadowed by all the big names added during the late 70’s.
As you said, he wasn’t as good as Mantle or Mays, yet most casual baseball fans think he was.
Jimmy Rollins? Good player. Not an “amazing” hitter.
Lots of very good hitters on the list. Lots of truly elite hitters who don’t show up on it at all, too.
I never intended to disparage Joe D. Hall of Famer, deservedly.
A hitting streak, though — if I’m not mistaken — was an unheralded and unknown record until Dimaggio, when after a lot of digging sportswriters found that Keeler had the longest previous streak. Had Joe D been a non-Yankee, would that digging have been done?
When will he be benched for smiling at the wrong time?