ST. LOUIS -- On a day that Lars Nootbaar wasn’t even supposed to play for the Cardinals amid his carefully curated return from offseason double heel surgery, he became the unexpected hero in the Cardinals' 6-5 win over the Reds Saturday.
With the Cardinals trailing 5-4 in the bottom of the eighth inning, Nootbaar clubbed his first big league home run of 2026.
The no-doubt blast traveled a Statcast-projected 433 feet and gave the Cardinals a 6-5 lead that they would not relinquish.
“It was good to be able to use him off the bench,” manager Oliver Marmol said. “Dude can hit, man. That was a big swing there, left on left, to do what we did. So that was a heckuva lot of fun for a lot of reasons.”
Nootbaar’s homer sent the Busch Stadium crowd into a frenzy of ‘Nooooots’ until the beloved outfielder returned to the playing surface to acknowledge their curtain call.
“I didn’t really hear it,” Nootbaar said. “I was celebrating with the guys in the dugout and they were saying to go up there. You know, it just sounds like boos, like usual, when they’re coming in.
“Usually, when I’m doing something well, I have a pretty good understanding that they’re Noots instead of boos.”
After Nootbaar’s go-ahead swing against Reds reliever Sam Moll put the game into Riley O’Brien territory, the Cardinals closer quickly readied to try and put a back-and-forth affair in the win column.
His appearance was anything but clean.
O’Brien breezed through two outs before allowing consecutive hits to tighten the moment. A walk to Spencer Steer jammed up the bases with Reds, bringing standout rookie Sal Stewart to the plate for all the marbles.
The final at-bat contained an ABS challenge win by both sides, including an entire stadium willing Cardinals catcher Jimmy Crooks to challenge ball four on a 3-1 pitch that would have otherwise resulted in a game-tying walk.
Marmol doesn’t have a great read yet on the rookie catcher’s body language in those spots -- so the Cardinals' manager was right there with the crowd, anxiously awaiting the helmet tap.
“He kept me in suspense,” Marmol said. “I think he was in suspense himself.”
Then came the long moments staring at the video board, waiting to learn if O’Brien had just blown a save -- or whether he had a crack at a full-count pitch to Stewart.
“Just the time in between while you’re waiting,” Marmol said with a chuckle. “Adds a level of excitement for the fans. I’m not sure what I would call it for myself, but it was good.”
Adventurous though it may have been, Stewart grounded out to second to put it in the books as a scoreless top of the ninth for O’Brien. The Cardinals grabbed their second straight over the Reds on the weekend.
Nootbaar’s call into the action originally came in the bottom of the sixth inning. In that spot, he didn’t really have to do anything.
After the Cardinals orchestrated a double-steal to set up what seemed like a golden scoring opportunity with runners on second and third and nobody out, Marmol got aggressive.
He pulled back catcher Pedro Pagés in the middle of the count -- Pagés had been at the plate attempting to move the runners with a sacrifice bunt. But when the runners moved up without his assistance, the left-handed hitting Nootbaar was Marmol’s chosen adversary for Cincinnati righty Tejay Antone.
“I love the conversation between me and [Daniel Descalso] there as far as how we were thinking through that,” Marmol said. “As soon as they make the pitching change, we were going to take the risk of taking both bags there. We knew that if we were successful at it, we would pinch-hit.”
But Nootbaar got the intentional pass, leading Marmol to deploy Jimmy Crooks in a pinch-hit spot with the bases loaded.
The sequence fizzled -- Crooks grounded into a 3-2-4 double play before Masyn Winn bounced out to short. The Cardinals had squandered a monumental scoring chance.
Marmol acknowledged postgame that there was genuine consideration to flipping the order in which he deployed Nootbaar and Crooks, given that Crooks might be more susceptible to the type of double play that ultimately unfolded.
But going to Nootbaar, then Crooks in the sixth ultimately brought Nootbaar to the plate one at-bat earlier for that spot in the eighth.
“That’s part of it, is getting his at-bat one closer to get that second one,” Marmol said. “And that’s what tipped us over the edge to do it the way we did.”
So, it wasn’t the scoring chance on which Nootbaar was originally meant to flip the game. But when his moment came, Nootbaar didn’t miss it.