Jordan Walker’s Breakout Season Just Joined Cardinals Royalty

A 20th homer against the Cubs put Walker alongside Pujols and Hornsby, capping a career turnaround years in the making.

recall 

• A Three-Run Statement in a Losing Effort
• Hornsby, Pujols, and a Contested Footnote
• The Numbers Behind the Moment
• From Can’t-Miss Prospect to Cautionary Tale to Breakout
• An All-Star Nod to Match the Moment
• What Comes Next

Jordan Walker’s long-awaited breakout season reached another level on Sunday at Wrigley Field. The St. Louis Cardinals outfielder crushed a three-run home run off the Chicago Cubs, his 20th of the year, marking the first 20-homer campaign of his young career. It was a milestone on its own. But paired with the 11 stolen bases already on his ledger, the blast pushed Walker into rarefied company: through the club’s first 87 games, only two other players in franchise history had ever combined 20 home runs with double-digit steals, and their names are Rogers Hornsby and Albert Pujols.

Not a bad group to keep.

20+ homers and 10+ SB in team’s first 87 games, Cardinals history:

2026 Jordan Walker
2009 Albert Pujols
1922 Rogers Hornsby https://t.co/rTtTDtGGwz

— Sarah Langs (@SlangsOnSports) July 5, 2026

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The homer came in a game the Cardinals ultimately lost, 6-4, closing out a difficult but revealing road trip. St. Louis had just finished a six-game gauntlet against two of the National League’s playoff contenders, Atlanta and Chicago, and arrived in Wrigley worn down by a late finish in Atlanta and the general grind of divisional rivalry baseball. Walker’s blast gave the Cardinals an early lead, and he added a sacrifice fly later in the game to finish with four RBIs on the day.

The lead didn’t hold. Chicago answered with a four-run sixth inning, aided by a pair of costly Cardinals throwing errors — one from third baseman José Fermín on a botched double-play attempt, another from Walker himself, whose aggressive throw from right field skipped past third base and let an extra run score. Manager Oliver Marmol didn’t dress it up afterward, acknowledging the mistakes cost the team the game but framing it as the cost of doing business over a 162-game season.

Even in defeat, the Cardinals left Chicago with something manager and players both pointed to as more valuable than a single result: proof, four games into a brutal stretch against two of the league’s better teams, that St. Louis belongs in the conversation. The Cardinals finished the road trip 4-2, and Walker was blunt about where his team’s head is at. He said he’s always believed in this roster, and going into two of the sport’s best teams and doing what they did against them is a strong sign for how the club is playing right now.

St. Louis left Wrigley at 47-40, holding onto the final National League Wild Card spot as the trade deadline approaches — a very different set of stakes than the Cardinals have operated under in recent seasons, and one now anchored in large part by Walker’s bat.

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The framing of Walker’s milestone has varied slightly depending on the source, which is worth noting for the record. Several reports, citing MLB.com researcher Sarah Langs, describe Walker as the first Cardinal to pair 20 home runs and 10 stolen bases through the team’s first 87 games since Albert Pujols accomplished it in 2009 — positioning it as a two-man club. Other outlets frame it more expansively, crediting Walker as the third player in franchise history to do it, joining both Pujols and Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby. St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Derrick Goold’s own phrasing, meanwhile, describes Walker and Pujols as the only two Cardinals in club history to reach 20 homers and 10 steals by the All-Star break — a related but not identical statistical cut (by the break, rather than through 87 team games).

Whichever framing holds up as the definitive one, the throughline doesn’t change: this is a plateau that, prior to Sunday, only Pujols and Hornsby had ever reached in a Cardinals uniform. Pujols closed his Cardinals career with 469 home runs across two stints in St. Louis and helped deliver two World Series titles. Hornsby remains one of the most feared hitters the sport has ever produced, a multiple-time MVP whose offensive numbers from the 1920s still stand among the best of all time. Walker, at 24 years old and in his fourth big-league season, is nowhere near either Hall of Famer’s career resume yet — nobody, including Walker, is pretending otherwise. But the comparison itself, however it’s precisely worded, says plenty about where his season currently sits.

Walker’s own reaction leaned into that humility. Told about the company he was keeping, he called both players legends and simply added that it felt “super cool” — a modest response to a milestone that’s anything but.

Jordan Walker’s Topps Rookie Debut card commemorates his March 30, 2023 Major League debut with the St. Louis Cardinals, featuring an action image and portrait inset.

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Entering Sunday, Walker was slashing .291/.350/.520 with an .870 OPS, 19 home runs and a league-leading 63 RBIs through 84 games, having already set a new career high in stolen bases at 11. His FanGraphs WAR sat at 3.2 — already higher than the combined total of his first three big-league seasons. After the 20th homer and the four-RBI day against the Cubs, his season batting line moved to .292 with 67 RBIs, numbers that currently lead the Cardinals in all four core offensive categories: average, home runs, RBIs, and stolen bases.

It’s a stat line that would be a career year for most players in the middle of their prime. For Walker, it represents something closer to a complete reversal of fortune.

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Walker’s path to this season has been anything but a straight line. Selected 21st overall by St. Louis in the 2020 draft out of Decatur High School in Georgia, Walker was one of the sport’s most hyped position-player prospects by the time he debuted in 2023 — the first player born in 2002 to reach the majors, and the youngest player in the league that season at just over 20 years old. That rookie year was solid enough on its own, with Walker hitting .276 with 16 home runs and 51 RBIs across 117 games.

Then came the stretch that tested the organization’s patience. Between 2024 and 2025, Walker was worth roughly -2.5 wins above replacement, batting .211 with 11 home runs and 61 RBIs across 162 games — numbers far below what his draft pedigree and prospect rankings had promised. He was optioned to Triple-A Memphis multiple times as he reworked his swing, battled a wrist injury and a bout of appendicitis in 2025, and heard the kind of outside chatter that follows any former top prospect who stalls: trade rumors, demotion calls, and questions about whether the physical tools would ever fully translate.

The Cardinals stayed the course. Walker struggled again in spring training ahead of 2026, to the point that some fans were publicly calling for him to open the year back in the minors. St. Louis didn’t blink, and the decision has been repaid many times over. Walker has emerged in 2026 as one of the National League’s most complete offensive threats — a 6-foot-6, 250-pound presence in the middle of the Cardinals’ order who now combines his long-standing raw power with a stolen-base total that suggests real defensive and baserunning polish to go with it.

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The timing of Sunday’s homer made it feel like part of a larger celebration rather than an isolated achievement. Just a day earlier, on the Fourth of July, Walker was named to his first career All-Star team as a National League reserve, a selection announced in a Cardinals clubhouse meeting that reportedly left the normal composed outfielder view emotional. Manager Oliver Marmol addressed the team directly, telling players that the honor wasn’t really about three months of production — it was about three years of perseverance through the kind of public doubt that could have derailed a lesser competitor.

Walker will represent St. Louis at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia on July 14, and has already expressed interest in taking part in the Home Run Derby the night before if invited. It’s a fitting bookend to a stretch that began with evaluators anointing him a future All-Star talent while he was still working his way up through the minor leagues — a label that took three frustrating years to actually live up to.

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The Cardinals now turn toward a series against the Milwaukee Brewers, still jockeying for playoff position with the trade deadline closing in. For a St. Louis front office that has spent much of the past year weighing rebuild-versus-contend decisions, Walker’s emergence changes the calculus considerably. A homegrown, 24-year-old middle-of-the-order bat locked into affordable team control for years to come is exactly the kind of asset that can accelerate a competitive timeline rather than delay it.

Whether Walker’s name ultimately gets tied to Pujols alone, or to both Pujols and Hornsby, in the record books may end up a matter of which endpoint — the All-Star break or the 87-game mark — historians settle on. What’s not up for debate is the season itself. A player who spent two years fighting to justify his prospect pedigree has turned into one of the most productive hitters in the National League, and the Cardinals’ postseason hopes are riding on him staying exactly that way.