Cardinals News: Jordan Walker recalled to St. Louis, Matt Carpenter to the IL

After all of St. Louis Cardinals' media and the fanbase discussed if and when outfielder Jordan Walker would return to the big league club, the Cardinals announced this morning that Walker has been recalled to St. Louis after placing Matt Carpenter on the injured list with a lower back strain.

Walker has been on fire for Memphis the last few weeks, posting an OPS north of 1.000 in his last 60+ at-bats and absolutely hammering the baseball with real consistency. Walker has always been a guy who can generate hard contact and eye-popping exit velocities, but his ability to barrel the ball more frequently as of late and get more line drives and fly balls has led to a massive uptick in production.

The Cardinals are desperate for more offensive production right now, especially from the right side of the plate. St. Louis is one of the worst teams in baseball when facing left-handed pitching, and they actually square off against lefty Andrew Abbott tonight in Cincinnati.

It remains to be seen how the Cardinals will fit Walker's bat into the lineup, but imagine it will be every day. Against right-handed pitching, we may see Tommy Pham return to a bench role to be utilized as a weapon late in games, or the club could decide to limit Nolan Gorman or Lars Nootbaar's appearances for now, as both of them have been terrible offensively as of late. I do wonder if maybe Paul Goldschmidt gets more off-days against right-handed pitching now as well.

Against lefties, the bench (in my mind) clearly becomes Pedro Pages, Brandon Crawford, Nolan Gorman, and one of Lars Nootbaar or Alec Burleson. All four of those bats are dreadful against southpaws this year, so the Cardinals will need Walker and Pham both in the lineup on those days.

In all honestly, we probably see a combination of the things I listed above happen, rather than some consistent way of handling the lineup day to day. Unless some bats get hot and cannot be left out of the lineup, manager Oliver Marmol will want to mix and match guys as well as give off days to see if he can find the lineup that will unlock this offense.

What I am confident in though is that Walker will be in the lineup almost every day. The Cardinals were not going to call up Walker again until they felt like he was ready to never look back again. Now, I do think a lot of this move was motivated by their desperation for offensive production, but I don't think they would have gone in this direction if they felt like it would go poorly again.