About 20 games into the season, Jordan Walker is forcing a new conversation in St. Louis. The Cardinals outfielder has eight home runs, sits among FanGraphs’ top five position players in WAR and has helped keep a club that was stripped down in Chaim Bloom’s first offseason above.500.
Walker’s rise is the sharpest sign yet that the Cardinals may have something real in a year that began with a reset. Bloom traded away Nolan Arenado, Willson Contreras, Sonny Gray and Brendan Donovan as part of that overhaul, leaving the club to sort out who could carry it forward. Walker, 25, has answered with production that stands out even with a 28.7 percent strikeout rate and a history that gave the organization reasons to hesitate.
That hesitation came from the last two seasons. Walker posted a.595 OPS across the 2024 and 2025 campaigns, and his defense in right field had already dragged down his value, with minus-20 defensive runs saved in his career there. This season has looked different. He has four defensive runs saved so far, a number that does not erase the past but does make his overall start harder to dismiss.
Cam Schlittler has done something just as eye-catching in New York, only with a much smaller track record. The 25-year-old right-hander has made five starts, thrown 27.2 innings and put up FanGraphs marks of 0.88 in FIP and 1.5 in WAR, both best in the majors. His most visible arrival point came in Game 3 of the ALWCS, when he struck out 12 Boston Red Sox over eight shutout innings.
Schlittler’s early run matters because it is already changing the way the Yankees can think about a rotation that needed certainty. A pitcher can ride one hot stretch for only so long, but five starts are enough to show whether the stuff is real. So far, his has been.
Pete Crow-Armstrong is the other side of the early-season ledger. He has a 61 OPS+ to open 2026, a steep drop for a player who started in the All-Star Game last summer and looked like a breakout force for Chicago a year ago. In the first half of 2025, Crow-Armstrong posted a.302 on-base percentage, an.847 OPS and 25 home runs. In the second half, he hit.216 with a.634 OPS.
That split is the tension inside his start now. The production that made him one of the most explosive young players in the game last summer is still part of the record, but it is not showing up in the mlb scores today view of this season. What comes next for Crow-Armstrong will say more about whether this is a brief slump or the beginning of a harder adjustment than anyone expected.
