NEW YORK -- Harrison Bader dazzled in his first game back in his hometown, tying the game against the Mets in the ninth before it was suspended by rain Thursday night at Citi Field.

The game will be resumed Friday at 5:10 p.m. CT in the bottom of the ninth inning. The second game of the series is scheduled for 6:10 CT.

• Gameday

Rain didn’t stop the Cardinals' center fielder from showing more than 150 guests from his high school -- Horace Mann in the Bronx -- what he’s capable of. If it weren't for Bader, anyway, there wouldn’t be a need for the continuation of the bottom of the ninth inning on Friday.

The 25-year-old native of Bronxville, N.Y., tied the game with a two-out RBI double to left field in the top of the ninth. He slipped on a wet infield rounding second base and was tagged out to send the game to the bottom of the inning -- before the tarp went officially on the field.

Hitting in pouring rain isn’t easy, but that didn’t concern Bader.

“Mind over matter,” Bader said. “If you don’t mind it, it don’t matter. That’s how it rolls.”

The bottom of the ninth inning will start Friday with Carlos Martinez on the mound for the Cardinals. The right-hander was officially in the game when the rain delay started, so he stays in. The Cardinals will announce Friday who will be the extra pitcher called up for the second game.

There was some confusion if the game would be delayed before the top of the ninth. The tarp was beginning to be unrolled, but Mets players were on the field and Cardinals manager Mike Shildt and Mets manager Mickey Callaway came to talk to the umpires.

Then the rain lightened up, so the grounds crew decided to try Diamond Dry on the field before play resumed. But with puddles forming in the infield and around home plate, crew chief Jeff Kellogg said it wasn’t going to be playable.

“If you can get the game in and you're playing in the conditions that are suitable to play in, I think you try to do that,” Kellogg said. “But once it became where it's not, then I think you got to say, 'OK, let's stop.' It wasn't an easy one. Sometimes they're tough. They're not easy. Some are easy, some aren't.”

“I just want to make sure we’re informed and if there’s going to be a dialogue, that I’m involved with it,” Shildt added. “I don’t pretend to be a weatherman, I don’t pretend to be an umpire. I just want to make sure we’re talking through it, we know what’s going on. If they tell us to play, we’ll play. We’ll play in the rain, we’ll play in the street.”

Bader’s ninth-inning double wasn’t his only feat of the night. He ripped a double just fair down the right-field line and a single up the middle. He stole two bases -- one in the third inning to get on third base for Matt Carpenter’s RBI single in the third inning.

He also started a double play in the bottom of the sixth inning that held the Mets to just one run after loading the bases. Bader caught a deep fly ball over his shoulder, stopped at the warning track and fired it to Carpenter on the third-base line, who got it to Wong at third and ended the inning.

“I can’t make it a bigger deal than it is for me,” Bader said. “I have to approach it just like another game, which is what I did. The only difference is I have a few more people in the stands.”