St. Louis Cardinals slugger Matt Holliday, on the disabled list for a quadriceps injury, returned to the lineup Thursday and paid immediate dividends for the Cardinals, homering in a loss to the Washington Nationals. The home run was Holliday’s seventh of the season, and improved his season-to-date line to .348/.443/.563. Holliday, usually a durable outfielder, has tantalized fantasy baseball owners this year with a combination of some of the best hitting of his career and two separate stretches of lost time; in April, after homering in his first game of the season, he missed a stretch of games after undergoing an emergency appendectomy.
He returns to a Cardinals squad that’s lost six games, in spite of Lance Berkman’s continued excellence and Albert Pujols’s slow reemergence as one of the game’s best hitters; the Cardinals would probably like to take his recovery slowly, but they’re unlikely to sit him until they get off the losing streak, preferably this weekend against the Kansas City Royals.