St. Louis Cardinals Latest Comeback May Have Been Their Best Yet Due To One Key Underrated Inning

Coming from behind to win games in dramatic fashion has been a staple of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2025. But Saturday’s comeback win, their 19th of the year, was as impressive as any we’ve seen from the Cardinals this season.

That’s because of the humble beginnings that were required to get the ball rolling at a stage of the game where a Cards win generally didn’t seem like a probable outcome.

Despite holding a 2-1 lead through six innings, the Cardinals quickly found themselves down 5-2. Steven Matz had a hiccup in the seventh that included a run-in with Elly De La Cruz—it happens.

Then Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol pushed rookie Andre Granillo through parts of three separate innings, but the eighth inning wasn’t entirely clean, as he allowed Cincinnati’s fifth run. 

So not only did the Cardinals lose the lead in the seventh, but the Reds tacked on in the eighth to seemingly cement their status. Momentum was not on the side of St. Louis.

So with nobody on base and two outs in the bottom of the eighth, the Cardinals trailed by three runs and had no real prospects for a comeback when Victor Scott II stepped to the plate. But with Scott getting things started, the Cardinals proceeded to rattle four consecutive singles off Cincinnati reliever Tony Santillan to cut the deficit to 5-4.

Scott and Brendan Donovan jumped on early hitter-friendly counts to get on base. Masyn Winn and Alec Burleson both faced two-strike counts, with Winn’s running full, before delivering their key contributions to the win.

How often do you see a string of two-outs singles claw a team back from the dead in a game the way it happened for the Cardinals on Saturday?

Sure, Nolan Arenado homered in the ninth to tie it. That’s a loud moment with major implications for the veteran third baseman. And Yohel Pozo became the hero with his 11th-inning walk-off hit, he's the one who get showered with electrolyte-dense liquids. Those emotional moments will steal the bulk of the headlines from this game, which resulted in the resurgent Cardinals’ fifth straight victory.

But if not for the humble beginnings of the Cardinals’ eighth-inning rally, those moments either don’t happen, or they don’t mean nearly as much as they did.Nolan