Jordan Walker swiped his 20th base of the season Wednesday night against the San Francisco Giants, becoming the first St. Louis Cardinals player to post a 20-home run, 20-stolen base season since Tommy Pham in 2017.
The milestone completed a long-awaited breakout for the 24-year-old right fielder. Walker now sits at 28 home runs, 20 steals, 100 RBI, and a .278/.336/.482 slash line through 149 games. He is an All-Star for the first time and won the Home Run Derby in July, the first Cardinal to claim the event.
Walker is just the third player in Cardinals history to record 20 home runs, 20 stolen bases and 100 RBI in the same season. The others are Fernando Tatis in 1999 (34 homers, 21 steals, 107 RBI) and Ray Lankford in 1998 (31 homers, 26 steals, 105 RBI). Pham reached 23 homers and 25 steals in 2017 but finished with 73 RBI. Before Pham, Reggie Sanders was the last Cardinals 20/20 player, in 2004. Albert Pujols never posted a 20/20 season in a St. Louis uniform.
The numbers represent a sharp reversal from 2025, when Walker hit .215 with six home runs and 41 RBI in 111 games and finished with negative WAR. This year he has stayed in the lineup, driven in runs in bunches, and shown enough speed to make the 20-steal mark realistic rather than a late-season stretch. He spent time in the Cardinals’ hitting lab in spring training with the stated goal of slowing the game down at the plate. The results have followed.
Walker still strikes out at a high clip (25.5 percent) and his September numbers have cooled. Those are real caveats. They do not erase what he has already done: 28 homers and 100 RBI from a player who entered the year with plenty to prove after two uneven seasons. At 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds with plus bat speed and a strong arm in right field, the tools that made him a first-round pick in 2020 are finally showing up together.
The Cardinals sit at 75-78 and outside the playoff picture. Walker’s season is one of the clearer individual successes of a rebuilding year. He is under team control through 2030 and will enter arbitration after 2026. If this version of Walker is closer to the baseline than the 2025 version, St. Louis has a middle-of-the-order bat and a potential cornerstone for the next competitive window.
Twenty-twenty seasons are rare in Cardinals history. Adding 100 RBI to the mix makes Walker’s year even more distinctive. That is worth noting even as the team plays out the schedule.
