He would be expensive. BA says his early numbers were mainly bad luck:
Jordan Walker is such a mammoth human that it’s sometimes easy to forget just how young he is. In fact, he’s more than three months younger than Dylan Crews. I want you to put yourself in Jordan Walker’s shoes for a second. You’re a consensus top 5 prospect coming into the 2023 season, and not only do you make the club, but you post a 116 wRC+ in your first season, while learning a new position that you’ve never played before. Then the clock turns to 2024, and you get some bad luck, and boom, you’re now back in Triple-A. I’m speaking for myself here, but if that happened to me, I’d find it very hard to pick myself up and perform at my best.
This is important context when we evaluate Walker’s early season struggles at AAA. We often forget that these are human beings (other than perhaps Corey Kluber), and that being good at baseball is really really hard. Let me show you some pictures.
Jordan Walker in 2023 showed slightly below average launch angles, but excellent power, which gave him above average contact quality. He made about average in-zone contact and traded some in-zone aggression for some out-of-zone chase. This fully supported his quality rookie season, and is quite exceptional for a 21 year old making their MLB debut.
Fast forward to early this season. He chases less. He swings at pitches in the zone more. His average exit velocity is up. His contact is up. His zone contact is improved. His launch angles are improved. Practically everything that matters is better than it was the previous year, exactly what you’d expect from a precocious young talent. But there was one big problem, his slugging on contact was way down, as the gods of baseball did not shine their favour on him in the early going. Inexplicably, the Cardinals sent him down, a decision I couldn’t disagree with more. He got better! If they had just waited a month or two, the top-level results would have been more in line with the underlying metrics.
Walker, despite his struggles after he was demoted, still hits the ball really hard, with plus exit velocities against all pitch types, and still makes a ton of contact. I tried to find some clear data-driven reasons as to why Walker is playing well again, but I couldn’t find anything definitive. I think it’s as simple as this: he finally got over being demoted and has found himself again.