Jordan Walker finally made the scoreboard feel his presence again. The St. Louis Cardinals right fielder crushed a three-run homer off Atlanta’s Hurston Waldrep in the first inning on Thursday, a 396-foot blast that ended a 14-game stretch without an extra-base hit. That drought had quietly become a problem nobody in the organization wanted to talk about out loud.
Walker’s June was fine. Not great, not terrible. Just sort of there. He hit .288 with a .342 on-base and .509 slugging coming into this game, and those numbers are solid for a 24-year-old who struggled badly against big league pitching in 2024 and 2025. But the power had gone missing for two full weeks. No doubles, no triples, no homers. Just singles and walks and a lot of routine fly balls to the track.
Then he got ahold of one from Waldrep, another first-round pick from the 2023 draft class, and the ball did what it used to do. It left the yard. Walker now has 19 homers and 62 RBIs on the season, and he’s starting to look like the hitter the Cardinals thought they were getting when they called him up two years ago.
The bigger problem for St. Louis
The Cardinals are 44-39 and still hanging around in the NL Central race, but they’ve lost three straight series and the Braves answered Walker’s home run with five runs in the bottom of the first. Dusty May, who’s been mostly reliable this year, got lit up in Truist Park and the game quickly slipped away from St. Louis.
If this team wants to make the playoffs for the first time since 2022, Walker can’t just be good in spurts. He needs to set the tone every night. The lineup doesn’t have enough thump around him to absorb long cold streaks. Paul Goldschmidt is still doing Paul Goldschmidt things, but Nolan Arenado has lost some pop and the bottom half of the order is inconsistent at best.
Walker is 6-foot-6 and built like a tight end. He hits the ball hard consistently. The question has always been whether he’d adjust to how pitchers attack him after they’ve seen him a few times. The early returns this season suggest he’s figured something out. His OPS is .852 and he’s barreling up fastballs he would’ve waved at a year ago.
One game doesn’t fix everything. But breaking a 14-game extra-base hit drought with a three-run homer in a hostile ballpark is a good place to start. Walker seems to understand that. He’s been talking about wanting to carry this momentum through July and into the second half. For a Cardinals team that hasn’t had much to feel good about lately, that’s worth watching.
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