{"id":661271,"date":"2026-04-03T18:20:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T18:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/661271\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T18:20:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T18:20:29","slug":"cardinals-jordan-walker-with-97-mph-trend-brings-st-louis-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/661271\/","title":{"rendered":"Cardinals&#8217; Jordan Walker, with 97 MPH trend, brings St. Louis hope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jordan Walker looks young again.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not to say that the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportingnews.com\/us\/mlb\/st-louis-cardinals\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">St. Louis Cardinals<\/a>&#8216; right fielder actually got old, but he did precipitously drop off from his phenom prospect status.<\/p>\n<p>This season, Walker looks like that kid who had all the hype in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>And one number, at least to an extent, can sum it up: 97.7 miles per hour.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s Walker&#8217;s exit velocity entering action on Friday, April 3. It&#8217;s ranked No. 5 in all of MLB.<\/p>\n<p>And while it won&#8217;t stay that high the entire season, Walker has clearly discovered something with his swing that is allowing him to more consistently hit the ball hard.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not that Walker didn&#8217;t make solid contact in his past, but something was missing: the actual contact.<\/p>\n<p>And really, Walker needed to be more selective in the first place to reach this kind of power.<\/p>\n<p>MORE:\u00a0<a target=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sportingnews.com\/us\/mlb\/boston-red-sox\/news\/meet-tyler-uberstine-red-sox-newest-roster-addition-path-mlb-impossible\/7f5fabf8bc017b19785adf15\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">This Red Sox pitcher traveled an impossible path to the major leagues<\/a><\/p>\n<p>His trend from last season to this, with small sample size acknowledged, is encouraging.<\/p>\n<p>Last season, Walker chased pitches out of the zone 34.1% of the time, and he swung-and-missed 35.6% of the time.<\/p>\n<p>This season, Walker has chased out of the zone 25.0% of the time, and has whiffed 28.9% of the time.<\/p>\n<p>Those are big enough changes that Walker can more consistently do damage, to the point that if he keeps it up, he can go from a fringe MLB player to a feared slugger.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s still early, and things can change, but don&#8217;t look away yet.<\/p>\n<p>Walker is also running 28.9 miles per hour in average sprint speed, which ranks in the 97th percentile in MLB and would be a massive addition to his game if it keeps up.<\/p>\n<p>Something has led to Walker taking a better approach to his game this season. Whatever it is, it&#8217;s a big deal.<\/p>\n<p>More MLB news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jordan Walker looks young again. That&#8217;s not to say that the St. Louis Cardinals&#8216; right fielder actually got&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2403],"tags":[5,160,4,673,67,4311,4310],"class_list":{"0":"post-661271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-st-louis-cardinals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-cardinals","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-st-louis","12":"tag-st-louis-cardinals","13":"tag-stlouis","14":"tag-stlouiscardinals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116342163556013860","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}