PHILADELPHIA -- As guest PA announcer Michael Buffer introduced him for the finals of the Home Run Derby on Monday, Jordan Walker couldn’t help but grin. Buffer had barely gotten through the beginning of his script when the Citizens Bank Park crowd started booing. Barely a soul in Philadelphia wanted Walker to win. Through no fault of his own, he had become the villain.
Here’s the thing though: sometimes villains win. So it was with Walker, who overcame a cavalcade of boos to upend Kyle Schwarber, the overwhelming fan favorite, 12-11 in the finals.
“I was once told you don’t boo nobody,” Walker said in an on-field interview as he was presented with his trophy. “So it feels pretty good.”
After Schwarber clubbed 11 homers to send the crowd into a frenzy, Walker found himself sitting on eight with one swing left in the finals. Batters who end on a homer are allowed unlimited swings after that until a ball doesn’t go over the fence, and Walker took full advantage, hitting four in a row to upend Schwarber.
In doing so, he became the first Cardinals player to win the Derby.
For Walker, the entire Derby was a showcase of the revamped swing that made him an All-Star. The first hack Walker took in the Home Run Derby on Monday produced a 461-foot shot over the Liscio’s Bakery sign to the second deck in left. The sixth homer he hit landed even farther away, a Statcast-projected 470 feet.
Outside of Junior Caminero, who is an outlier in several ways, no one in Major League Baseball has produced a higher bat speed this season than Walker. It is a swing built for the Home Run Derby. And the Home Run Derby was built for a place like Citizens Bank Park, which annually rates among the easiest stadiums in the league to go yard.
“Philly flies a little better than St. Louis,” as Walker put it.
To prove it, Walker dominated the first round of the Derby, hitting 10 homers on his first 13 swings and 13 total, before hitting six more in the second round to dispatch Caminero in a head-to-head matchup, knocking Caminero out on a walk-off to end the round early and conserve his energy. Wearing a backwards cap to evoke a right-handed Ken Griffey Jr., with his father high-fiving fans around him in the stands, Walker then took on Schwarber in the finals.
“He was awesome today,” his dad, Derek Walker, said afterward. “I just loved everything about it. Just his attitude, his approach, the smoothness of his swing – looked like his dad. But I thought, yeah, he just did a great job. We’re just so proud of him. He’s just -- really, we’re proud.”
Before Walker, the highest finishing Cardinals player in a Derby was Albert Pujols, who lost to Garret Anderson in the finals of the 2003 event.
Before this season, Walker struggled for three years to find his footing at the highest level, following up a promising rookie campaign in 2023 with disappointing summers the next two years. In 2024-25 combined, Walker hit just 11 homers. He spent a significant chunk of 2024 in the Minors, looking to unlock more power in his swing. The next year, a pair of injuries further inhibited Walker from establishing himself.
Then came this year. Entering Spring Training, Walker worked with the Cardinals’ hitting team on simplifying his swing. Rather than focus on minute mechanical adjustments, the former top prospect fell back into old habits, with a swing capable of regularly pulling the ball in the air. Over his first 16 games of the season, Walker hit eight home runs, finally unlocking the power he and the Cardinals knew was inside him. He finished with 22 before the break to earn an invitation to his first career Derby.
“I felt better than I ever have, in all honesty,” Walker said. “I’m like, ‘What is this? What’s the blueprint for this? We need to just see what this looks like and try to replicate it. Instead of doing all these different swing dives and everything like that, I think we’ve just got to keep it simple, keep it athletic.' And then it really kind of took off from there.”