Why Cardinals sent Gorman, Walker to Triple-A

This story was excerpted from John Denton’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

ST. LOUIS – When the Cardinals spent their time, energy and financial resources reworking their pitching staff and fortifying the bullpen last offseason, they left the everyday lineup largely untouched.

President of baseball operations John Mozeliak and manager Oliver Marmol were banking, of course, on cornerstone infielders Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado having big bounce-back seasons and delivering something close to the thump they possessed in 2022. Also, the club also pledged its faith in promising players Nolan Gorman, Jordan Walker, Brendan Donovan, Lars Nootbaar and Alec Burleson growing and lengthening the lineup.

When the Cardinals demoted Walker and Gorman to Triple-A Memphis on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, it showed the fallacy in not better addressing the lineup last offseason and what could happen over the long season if their young core fell flat. Mozeliak said as much on Tuesday while announcing the demotion of Walker, admitting that neglecting the offense “just shows you that when you think you have something figured out, you probably still need to address it.”

Much of the offensive struggles of this season fall squarely on the shoulders of Arenado and Goldschmidt, who have undergone power outages few in baseball ever could have predicted.

Arenado did deliver one of his biggest knocks of the season late Wednesday night when he hit just the ninth walk-off grand slam in the past 50 seasons for the Cardinals, per MLB.com research. But the Goldschmidt/Arenado slides wouldn’t have been nearly as glaring if Gorman and Walker – two of the top prospects in the organization in recent years – hadn’t taken steps backwards in 2024.

Gorman, who led the Cardinals in home runs in 2023 with 27, seemed poised for a monstrous season after working hard all offseason to calm the back issues that had hurt him throughout his first two MLB seasons. The 24-year-old lefty slugger opened the season hitting between Goldschmidt and Arenado, but on Tuesday, he was in the eighth spot in the lineup, where he went hitless in four at-bats.

Even for an all-or-nothing slugger, Gorman’s swing-and-miss rate soared in St. Louis this season. His strikeout rate spiked from 31.9 percent in 2023 to 37.6 percent in 2024, as did his whiff rate (35.5 percent to 38.7 percent). As the strikeouts climbed to 151, his batting average dipped to .203 and he went homerless over his last 14 games before the demotion.

I asked Mozeliak a day before the Gorman demotion if that was a possible fix for the former first-round pick, and he took it a step further by saying, “Obviously, it’s a game of production up here and at some point, you’ve got to consistently produce, or we have to find someone who can.”

The Cardinals thought they uncovered a foundational piece for the next decade in 2023 when they put the 6-foot-6 Walker on the Opening Day roster. All he did after that was register hits in his first 12 games as a big leaguer at the raw age of 20 years old.

However, the Cardinals weren’t happy with Walker’s elevated ground ball rate, or his pitch selection and they sent him down – both in 2023 and again this season. Unlike last year, when Walker returned to the big leagues, went back into a full-time role and finished with a flurry, this time around, he was used only in a platoon role. While in the bigs for just a week, Walker saw playing time in just four games – three as a starter and once as a pinch-hitter – and he went 1-for-11 in disjointed playing time before being sent back to Triple-A.

Considering how things went sour with another former top prospect in the Cards' organization, Dylan Carlson – who was dealt to the Rays at the Trade Deadline – it was curious treatment of Walker, who recently had monstrous homers of 446 and 434 feet in the Minor Leagues.

Marmol said his message to Gorman was the same as what he had told Walker a day earlier. In a sport where confidence and rhythm play major roles in the development of young players, the Cards are hopeful that Gorman and Walker overcome the potential negative effects of getting demoted and use their time to improve so that they can rejoin the big league club.

“The one thing I told [Gorman] is, I don't want him to go down there with the thought of, 'This is where my season ends, and then I just focus on the offseason,’” Marmol said. “My hope is that he gets on track and then we have a decision to make sometime in September. I think this will serve him well. I think it's needed.”