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Lars Nootbaar has the quality down. Now he just needs the quantity.

The Cardinals know when Nootbaar is in the batter's box, he will produce. He's been the same, well-above-average hitter every season since he got to the Majors in 2021.

But the potential is still what people talk about. Because as good as Nootbaar has been in the batter's box, he hasn't stayed in the batter's box for a full season. He's had five stints on the injured list over the past two seasons, and his career high in games played is 117 (2023).

That's why Nootbaar's No. 1 goal entering 2025 is making this his first full season.

"For me, it's just making sure that I'm on the field," Nootbaar said last week at the Cardinals' Winter Warm-Up. "I think that when I've had those stretches of good baseball, it's just been uninterrupted."

Uninterrupted is the key. If Nootbaar has an uninterrupted season, he should have a great season.

"I trust my ability," Nootbaar said. "But it's just making sure that I'm at a point where it's uninterrupted."

All the underlying numbers are there to support that. Here are three keys that show Nootbaar is capable of big things if he can stay healthy:

1) He has great hard-hit numbers

Nootbaar excelled by almost all of Statcast's quality of contact stats in 2024.

The big one is his hard-hit rate, which was a career-high 49.5% and ranked in the top 10% of Major League hitters. When half your batted balls are hard-hit, you'll likely be a highly productive hitter.

And Nootbaar ranked even better on a per-swing basis. He made hard contact on 21.9% of his swings last season, which was third-best in MLB behind only Juan Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Nootbaar also ranked just outside the top 10% of the league with his 91.8 mph average exit velocity, and he ranked in the top quarter of the league in both expected batting average and expected slugging percentage.

In other words, if Nootbaar keeps doing what he's doing over the course of the 2025 season, he should end up with great numbers.

2) He has even better plate discipline

Nootbaar's foundation as a hitter is exceptional plate discipline. Really, that's the reason he's able to hit the ball hard consistently -- Nootbaar doesn't swing at bad pitches, so he can rip the good ones.

Nootbaar only chased 16.9% of pitches outside the strike zone last season. That was the lowest chase rate out of the 214 hitters who saw as many out-of-zone pitches as he did.

Lowest chase rate in 2024
Min. 750 out-of-zone pitches seen

1) Lars Nootbaar: 16.9%
2) Andrew McCutchen: 17.2%
3) Dylan Moore: 17.7%
4) J.P. Crawford: 18.2%
5) Juan Soto: 18.3%

Because he only swings at strikes, Nootbaar rarely whiffs (19.0% swing-and-miss rate, 82nd percentile of MLB), and he draws tons of walks (12.8% walk rate, 98th percentile of MLB) while not striking out very often.

And he does this every year. Nootbaar has been among the best big league hitters at not chasing balls in every season of his career.

That's why he should be able to keep up his offensive production in 2025, and only increase it if he's able to play 150 games like the other anchors of the Cardinals' lineup.

3) He has the right combo of bat speed and bat-to-ball skill

Statcast introduced bat-speed data for the first time in 2024, so we can really break down Nootbaar's swing.

Nootbaar's bat speed is good -- his 2024 average swing speed was 72.6 mph, more than 1 mph better than the MLB average of 71.5 mph. But what really stands out is his ability to use that bat speed to put the barrel of the bat on the baseball.

Nootbaar was one of the league leaders in ¡°blast rate,¡± one of the most important Statcast bat-tracking stats. A "blast" is a swing where the hitter both has a high bat speed and squares the ball up on the sweet spot of the bat.

A blast means the hitter used his "A" swing. It's the type of swing that turns into extra-base hits -- the MLB-wide slugging percentage on blasts was 1.184 last season.

Nootbaar generated a blast on 17.8% of his swings in 2024. That was a top-10 blast rate in all of baseball -- tied with Shohei Ohtani.

Highest blast rate per swing in 2024
Min. 500 competitive swings

1. Juan Soto: 21.0%
2. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: 19.4%
3. Yandy D¨ªaz: 19.2%
4. Giancarlo Stanton: 18.8%
5. Yordan Alvarez: 18.2%
6. Aaron Judge: 18.0%
7. Fernando Tatis Jr.: 17.9%
8 (tie). Lars Nootbaar: 17.8%
8 (tie). Shohei Ohtani: 17.8%
10. Gunnar Henderson: 17.6%

Most of those hitters are elite sluggers. But most of them also had a lot more competitive swings over the course of the season than Nootbaar did. (Competitive swings are just full swings that reflect the hitter's true bat speed.)

Ohtani, for example, had 1,253 competitive swings in 2024 ¡­ more than double Nootbaar's 539. So his blast rate turned into a lot more actual production than Nootbaar's. Ohtani had a Major League-best 223 total blasts in 2024. Nootbaar, who had the same rate of blast swings as Ohtani, had only 96 total blasts.

But in a way, that's a good sign for what a full season of Nootbaar could look like on the stat sheet. Nootbaar can be a great hitter in the Major Leagues if he just keeps swinging like he has been, from the start of the season to the finish.