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:

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.