JUPITER, Fla. -- About 30 minutes after finishing his batting practice session for the day, Jordan Walker stood in the Cardinals' clubhouse at Roger Dean Stadium on Sunday and began miming the beginning of his swing in front of teammate Thomas Saggese. He showed how he would move his hands and load his body as if he were about to swat at an invisible pitch.
Walker then handed his phone to Saggese.
"Oooooooh!," the infielder exclaimed with glee as he viewed video of Walker's BP.
"Just that first glance, that looks good," Saggese said a few minutes later to MLB.com. "That looks like the Walk from '23."
That's 2023, when Walker arrived in the Majors and smashed 16 homers and produced a 113 OPS+ as well as plenty of "oohs" and "ahs" through 117 games. The hulking slugger scorched pitches consistently. The ball exploded off his lumber. Debuting at just 20 years old, Walker looked like one of the brightest stars in the sport.
But he hasn't inspired much awe over the past two seasons. Since the beginning of 2024 -- a span of 162 games and 574 plate appearances -- Walker has hit just 11 home runs and posted a 68 OPS+, sixth worst in MLB among players with at least 550 PAs over the past two seasons. While his production plummeted, his whiff, strikeout and chase rates rose to untenable heights.
The good news? Walker has made some significant offseason changes that he is confident will get him back to that 2023 form or better.
A word of warning before we get into those changes, however: We've been here before. Walker lit up prior to last season when talking about how adjusting his hand placement in the batter's box -- bringing them closer to his frame before his swing -- would help him have a big 2025.
That didn't materialize. Walker finished with a .215/.278/.306 slash line with a 31.8% K rate through 111 games with St. Louis. The hands weren't the main issue; it was the rest of Walker's approach. It was, as he put it, "all out of whack."
"I was leaning. I was lunging towards the ball. It was just all over the place," he said. "... I was trying to make moves that I physically could not make."
Fixing that was the focus of his offseason. It began at Cressey Sports Performance in Florida. There, Walker got a detailed breakdown of how his body moves. He was given a workout plan designed to increase his flexibility and explosiveness. He dropped about seven pounds, putting him at about 260 at the start of this spring. Walker said the work he put into understanding his body has helped make his swing more controlled. He is not dipping out of his stance. A more fluid stride takes him cleanly through the baseball. His hands are still in a good place. Now everything else is following suit.
"My hands aren't flying up as much in the cage, and we're trying to take all that work out into the field," he said. "I'm attacking the ball the right way instead of crashing forward and falling forward and having to cheat towards the heater."
Walker doesn't need to cheat now. He said his reworked body now gives him a greater ability to stay back and adjust to a pitch even when his timing is a little off. It has put him in a better position to make contact, which is key for a player who swings exceptionally hard and creates a lot of thunder when his bat does meet the ball. It has also given him the comfort to be more aggressive on pitches in the strike zone. Last season, his 66.9% in-zone swing rate was in the middle of the pack. That's something he would like to change this year.
"The reason I feel like I wasn't [swinging more often at in-zone pitches] is I was afraid to chase," Walker said. "I was crashing, as I said, and not seeing the ball as well. Giving myself a better chance to hit, I'll be able to track it better. I’ll feel like I have more time. Now if it's in the zone, I'll be more confident and attack."
After two disappointing years, this is a big spring for Walker. Manager Oliver Marmol said the outfielder's preseason numbers don't matter as much as seeing him put these changes into practice and have good at-bats. If Walker does that, the numbers he desires could soon follow.
"Just trying to put that together so I can have a monster season," he said.