Two barrels in one at-bat? At least Gorman made the 2nd one count

ST. LOUIS -- After Mets starter Clay Holmes got Nolan Gorman to swing through strike one during his at-bat in the sixth inning on Monday night at Busch Stadium, catcher Francisco Alvarez did a very normal thing. He threw the ball back to the pitcher.

But Gorman was still reloading his bat following the swing-and-miss, and he got a little fast and loose with the recoil. So when Alvarez released it, the ball collided with the bat and caromed into foul ground, rolling toward the New York dugout.

Gorman didn’t mind the chance to reset.

“Yeah, honestly," Gorman said. “I literally thought, ‘Wow, it felt good to have a barrel.’”

The next pitch from Holmes also collided with Gorman’s bat -- and per Statcast, that one was also a barrel. The St. Louis third baseman unloaded on a 1-1 cutter, sending it into the Cardinal bullpen, a projected 419 feet.

Gorman’s second home run in as many days left the bat with an exit velocity of 110.3 mph, the hardest-hit ball of the game for the home team. His blast came as a consolation in an otherwise sleepy game for St. Louis as the Cardinals lost to the Mets, 4-2.

The swing marked the first time that Gorman had homered in back-to-back games since June 23-24, 2025, when he did so in a series against the Cubs at Busch Stadium.

In the sixth-inning sequence, Gorman saw a hard sinker miss above the zone before whiffing at a Holmes cutter, in on the hands. After benefitting from that feeling of the bat meeting the ball on the catcher’s errant throw, Gorman was able to adjust to another cutter from Holmes -- one that found more of the plate than the pitch he swung through.

“He attacked Burly the same way with the first two pitches, and then threw him a changeup,” Gorman said. “So I had the changeup in the back of my mind and was able to just react.”

Gorman has posted at least one hit and one RBI in each of the team’s four games to start the year. He attributed some of the early success to being in a good spot with his swing decisions and with his timing in the early days of the season.

“Not trying to do a whole lot and staying within himself,” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said of Gorman’s hot start to the campaign. “But there’s enough power in there where, if he makes contact, the ball goes. So we’re seeing a much better version of him of putting the ball in play. Not a ton of swing-and-miss.

“We’ve talked about it for a while -- when he’s in that mode, it’s a really solid at-bat.”

As opposed to the Cardinals’ first three games of the year, across which the St. Louis lineup piled up 15 runs in the sixth inning or later, Gorman’s solo homer on Monday was the only tally mustered by the Cardinals outside of a first-inning equalizer on an RBI hit by Alec Burleson.

But maintaining Gorman as a consistent power source will be a key element as the Cardinals aim to be a consistently resilient bunch -- and a pesky lineup to put away -- during this 2026 season.

“We’ve got a gritty team,” Gorman said. “So that’s going to be a lot of fun for 162 games.”