What’s behind Nolan Gorman’s resurgent season—and how it affects Cardinals' plans

No matter how you slice it, 2025 has been a bounce-back year for St. Louis Cardinals slugger Nolan Gorman.

Coming into the season, Gorman was one of the poster children for "runway," but his work with new hitting coach Brant Brown over the offseason had yet to produce the results the club was looking for, so Gorman began the 2025 campaign out of the Cardinals' everyday lineup.

Even as the months went on and Gorman began to heat up at the plate in limited opportunities, the Cardinals seemed reluctant to increase his playing time all that much. But as we near the end of the month of August, Gorman finds himself in the Cardinals' lineup almost every day and has been putting together consistent results in a way we haven't seen since 2023 for the left-handed power bat.

After slashing .203/.271/.400 with an 87 wRC+ in 2024, Gorman has rebounded big-time in 2025, posting a .223/.320/.414 slash line, good for a 105 wRC+. He's not producing like he did in 2023 quite yet, but the underlying metrics actually say he's closer to that guy than we might think.

What is leading to Nolan Gorman's resurgent season?

There are a few things that you can point out in Gorman's profile this year that have led to real change in his offensive production, and the majority of them revolve around his approach at the plate

When Gorman has had success at the plate historically, it's been when he's embraced his nature as a three true outcomes player. Gorman will likely never be a player who makes a ton of contact or eliminates much swing-and-miss from his game, but those weaknesses become manageable when he is taking his walks and mashing the pitches he can do damage with.

Back in 2023, when Gorman finished the year with a 118 wRC+ and 27 home runs in 119 games, he posted a .328 OBP and .478 SLG while striking out 31.9% of the time and hitting for just a .236 average. Gorman's O-Swing% was below 30%, so he limited his chase enough that opposing pitchers had to come into the zone more often or be content walking Gorman. That year, Gorman walked at an 11.4% clip, which ranked in the 83rd percentile in all of baseball.

This approach helped Gorman maximize his power potential over the course of the season, barreling balls at a 16.5% rate, posting a 48.5% hard-hit rate, and capitalizing on his launch angle-sweet spot 38.8% of the time. Gorman's xwOBA and xSLG both ranked in the 80th percentile or higher, so both the underlying and traditional metrics pointed to his bat being a hyper-productive one.

In 2024, things completely fell apart for Gorman. His strikeout rate was unplayable (37.6%), and his walk rate dropped to just 8.5%, which is only slightly above average rather than elite. While those couple of percentage changes might not seem like a huge deal, they turned Gorman into a player who beat himself time and time again.

Looking at Gorman's swing decisions again, 2024 saw him swing 2% more often than he did in 2023, but his contact rate on pitches both inside and outside the zone dropped by over 3%, resulting in a decline in contact% of almost 4% from his breakout 2023 campaign. He was swinging more often, making contact less often, and chasing more pitches than he did the year prior.

Gorman was lost at the plate, and that allowed pitchers to toy with him and attack him in all sorts of ways, with the most frustrating of regressions coming in the form of how pitchers could now blow fastballs by Gorman without fear of paying for it.

In 2023, Gorman posted a +7 run value on fastballs and +10 run value on sinkers, posting xSLGs of .491 and .826(!!!) respectively on each pitch. When Gorman had control of the strike zone, pitchers eventually had to give him a fastball or sinker, and Gorman would be sitting back and ready to crush those pitches. But in 2024, with Gorman seemingly fighting for his life every at-bat, he posted a -4 run value on fastballs and just +1 on sinkers, with the xSLG on those pitches dropping to .388 and .578.

In 2025, Gorman's power has not returned to quite the same marks that he was at in 2023, but the expected power numbers have rebounded, especially against sinkers. On fastballs this year, Gorman still had a -3 run value, but his xSLG is now back up to .463. On sinkers, Gorman has a +4 run value, and his xSLG on that pitch is an eye-popping .815 once again.

So Gorman is starting to hit heaters again, but why?

Well, if we go back and look at some of those plate discipline and swing decision indicators that we were looking at earlier, that picture becomes a lot clearer. In 2025, Gorman's walk rate has rebounded big-time, up to 12.7% of the time, which ranks in the 90th percentile. His strikeout and whiff percentages are back to where they were at in 2023 — bad, but not unplayable.

Looking at his swing decisions, Gorman has cut down on the number of pitches he swings at outside of the zone by almost 5%, and he's also dropped the number of pitches he swings at in the zone by 5%. Accompanied by the significant drop in swing percentage has come a major jump in the contact rate he is making. When Gorman does swing at pitches outside of the zone, he makes contact 5.2% more of the time, and he's making contact on pitches in the zone 7.3% more often. Gorman's 71.3% contact rate this year is a career high, and it comes with a career-low swing percentage. (46.6%). Both surpass his previous career bests that he set in 2023, the best year of his career.

What does Nolan Gorman's resurgence mean for the Cardinals' long-term outlook?

For much of the 2025 season, Gorman has been the odd man out playing time-wise, but that has changed as of late. Since June 7th, the day Gorman was back in the starting lineup after four consecutive days without a start and seemingly the beginning of more consistent playing time, he's second only to Willson Contreras on the team with a 125 wRC+, posting a .239/.337/465 slash line, very similar to the kind of production he had during his breakout 2023 campaign.

While his 178 plate appearances in this stretch are only seventh on the team, he's made the most of them, and if he finishes the year on this kind of trajectory, the Cardinals will have real reason to hope that they've got their exciting power bat back in the fold.

With Nolan Arenado still on the injured list and not appearing to be ready to return anytime soon, if at all, Gorman should be seeing an extended runway in the Cardinals' lineup from now through the final series of the year at Wrigley Field. It's up to him to make the most of that runway, and we'll have a much better sense of his standing with the organization when the season is over.

I know, we did not talk about his defense today, and that has been a really, really rough part of his game as of late. Gorman's -4 OAA at third base is tied for 39th out of the 51 players who have logged 200 or more innings at third base, and if that were spread over the course of a full season, he'd be in the conversation for worst defensive third baseman in baseball this year. That will also be a part of Gorman's evaluation down the stretch, as if he's this bad defensively at third base, his bat is really going to have to shine, or he'll have to be a 2B/DH type moving forward.

Still, most of the attention should be on Gorman's bat the rest of the way, and rightfully so. He has that power potential from the left side that no one else in the organization can even touch, and if the Cardinals can get that version of Gorman back long term, that is a big development for their lineup moving forward.