ST. LOUIS – One at bat in particular from the Cardinals’ 3-2 loss to the Mariners on Friday night reminded Cardinals’ slugger Jordan Walker of the respect he is suddenly commanding from foes and about the adjustments he is now faced with making.

Facing standout Seattle right-hander George Kirby in Friday’s sixth inning, Walker was engaged in a test of wills. Kirby wasn’t about to give the 6-foot-6, 250-pound Walker anything he could drive and teased him with a first-pitch slider on the outside corner that Walker wisely laid off. Then, Kirby came back with another slider – this one several inches off the plate – but Walker caved and offered at it futilely. Sticking with what worked, Kirby threw another low-and-away slider to retire Walker swinging.

Resisting those pitches – or at least fouling them off to buy himself another pitch – is the adjustment Walker is now faced with following his torrid start of the season.

“Your swing is going to break down poorly if you’re not swinging at pitches in the zone and it’s impossible to keep good posture and mechanics if you are swinging at stuff that is unhittable,” Cardinals’ manager Oli Marmol said of Walker’s front shoulder flying open and his back leg collapsing while chasing low-and-away pitches. “I want him evaluating his swing on pitches in the zone, but he shouldn’t be breaking down swings on pitches he shouldn’t be swinging at.

“But there are triggers and cues for him to see. He would chase and then he would lay off a couple. You don’t want to call that a win, but those are small wins and we have to get to a point where we (chase) less and less. We saw what was possible when he does (chase) less.”

Walker was the talk of the baseball world earlier in the season when he got off a torrid start that put him atop MLB in home runs. Back on April 13 – when Walker homered a third straight night and for a seventh time in a nine-game stretch – he was hitting .333 with eight home runs and leading the Cardinals in nearly every major statistical category.

Then, big-league league pitching understandably adjusted and put Walker’s patience to the test. More balls on the outer half of the plate and low-and-away spin – pitches that Walker was driving back up the middle and the other way during his strong start – cooled off the 23-year-old slugger’s stroke.

Following his 0 for 4 on Friday that included a looking strikeout, a swinging strikeout and a double play grounder in the eighth inning, Walker came into Saturday’s game just 5 for 33 with 15 strikeouts since April 13.

That mini-slump is not something that Walker wants to ponder considering the struggles he’s gone through over the first three years of his MLB career. Each of the past three seasons saw Walker flounder at the big league level and result in him getting demoted to Triple-A.

That’s something Walker certainly doesn’t want to think about. In fact, he doesn’t want to think about much of anything when he’s in the batter’s box, stressing that he’d rather be athletic and instinctual when hitting instead of robotic and cluttered with thinking too much.

“I’m really not thinking about my mechanics and shutting my brain off the best that I can,” Walker said recently. “It’s never possible to shut everything off, but as best as I can if I can just not think about my mechanics and then just swing when the ball is out there.”

Knowing the difficulty of hitting big-league pitching and how slumps are bound to happen over the course of a grueling, 162-game season, Walker even admitted recently that he was far from figuring things out in terms of not chasing sliders and sinkers strategically placed off the outside corner of the plate.

“I don’t know about (a potential loophole) being completely closed and it’s not like everything is fixed for sure,” Walker said candidly. “But definitely I feel a little bit better going after that (outside corner) pitch than I have in the past.”

Marmol pointed to a recent moment when Walker used MLB’s ABS system to challenge a strike call that he thought was off the plate, and replay proved the slugger to be correct. Marmol said he smiled in that instant because it meant that Walker was seeing the ball well and he was being diligent in not chasing pitches off the plate.

Now that pitchers have adjusted and are refusing to give him much to hit, it’s up to Walker to make the next adjustment to potentially get back to how he was swinging the bat earlier this season.

“Now, teams are going to be that much more careful in not feeding into (throwing Walker pitches in the middle of the plate), so now it’s about how can he not feed into it,” Marmol said. “How good can we get at chasing two, but taking one? Can we take two and chase one? Can we take all three of them? Or go on stretches where he lays off (unhittable pitches) at a much higher rate?

“We’re trying to find those small wins as you make progress. It’s all about not being the same two weeks from now and those tiny wins might lead to him going a full series and he only chased X-amount of times. … And from a mentality standpoint – when he has a series that doesn’t go well because he’s going to have them – and not panicking and chasing hits over productive at bats. For a young guy that’s difficult to do. But if he has a difficult series, he just has to stick to the plan.”

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