Cardinals fans can't fall for Statcast's bait again with Jordan Walker

"Statcast darling" is a term thrown around a lot in modern baseball circles. When fans see those dark red bars in their young players' MLB percentile ratings on Baseball Savant, it raises expectations for those players down the line, even if some of those players didn't have great numbers on the surface. St. Louis Cardinals fans are not immune to this tendency: In 2022, outfielder Lars Nootbaar hit a tepid .228 but boasted hefty Statcast metrics. Those, combined with his heroics in the World Baseball Classic during the offseason, led many Cardinals fans to project stardom for the worldwide sensation.

However, injuries dogged at Nootbaar over the next two seasons, limiting him to 117 games in 2023 and 109 the next season. When he played, he performed decently, with Baseball-Reference's Rbat+ stat placing him 18 points above league average in 2023 and 12 points above average in 2024, but he never leaped into the stratosphere as some had expected.

Nootbaar finally managed to cobble together a mostly healthy season in 2025, appearing in 135 games, but he faltered on the field, performing six points below average in Rbat+. After the season, it was revealed that Nootbaar had been suffering from yet another malady, this time in his feet. But by this point, all but the most passionate members of Noot Nation had grown weary of the outfielder's inability to reach the heights many had expected of him.

Now, another tease has entered the works.

Fans can't let Jordan Walker's Statcast story cloud their judgment again.

Cardinals supporters have become familiar with Walker's troubles at the major league level thus far in his career. After hitting .276 with a .787 OPS and 14 home runs in his first season, Walker cratered in both on-base ability and power, hitting .201 with a .619 OPS in 2024 and .215 with a .584 OPS in 2025. Power-wise, he dipped to five home runs in 2024 and six last season despite having only 69 fewer plate appearances in 2025 than in 2023.

A recent Redbird Rants article spoke of how fans can't give up on the 23-year-old Walker, partly because of his youth, solid rookie season and slight uptick in his performance in the second half of 2025, but also because of some interesting pieces in his Statcast numbers, especially his bat speed, hard-hit rate and exit velocity. But in a manner even more extreme than Nootbaar's, Walker has found little success actualizing those numbers into tangible big-league results. 

Walker has been the subject of some controversy regarding the Cardinals' attempt to fix his swing to let him hit more balls in the air and how he may have been resistant to the adjustments the team has tried to make. In the same vein as how many have believed that a healthy season will allow Nootbaar to break out, it's easy to dream that repairing Walker's swing will unlock his potential. 

In Walker's case, that's much easier said than done. Along with his propensity to pound the ball into the dirt, Walker is susceptible to flailing helplessly at breaking balls low and away, and plate discipline is one of the most difficult skills to teach a professional hitter. In a FanGraphs article from Kiley McDaniel, he and many other scouts believe that there is some inherent skill in a player's plate discipline that can't be changed. According to McDaniel, among above-average major league regulars, fewer than 10% of them significantly improved or worsened their plate discipline numbers once they reached the professional level from high school or college.

The Cardinals and hitting coach Brant Brown will have every opportunity to work with Walker to see if they can return him to the masher he showed himself to be as he ascended through the minor leagues. In a season with little to look forward to, it is logical to hope that Walker can turn his career around, but the Nootbaar saga should provide a warning to fans that they shouldn't place all of their eggs in the Statcast basket.