Cardinals rough up Pablo López early, hold on to beat Twins 5-3

ST. LOUIS – For the third straight year, Pablo López opened the Twins’ season in Missouri.

Make a note for the future: He’s better across the river from Kansas than from Illinois.

López, who allowed just one run and collected a pair of wins in his two Opening Day starts in Kansas City, wasn’t as sharp at Busch Stadium on Thursday. The Twins’ righthander allowed hits to eight of the first 15 Cardinals he faced, committed a balk, threw a ball into center field for an error and absorbed the Twins’ first loss of the season, 5-3 before a sellout crowd of 47,395.

López got the start, in part, because of his unflappability amid distractions, manager Rocco Baldelli said.

“You kind of have to ride the energy on Opening Day and win the game ‘cause no one really feels relaxed like they normally do or play the game like they normally do,” Baldelli said. “That comes later this week, like later on. Go out there and just kind of ride the high today and get it done.”

But it was a former, not a current, Twin who got it done.

Sonny Gray was sharp against his former team, striking out six in five innings and making only one major mistake: a middle-of-the-plate sweeper that former Cardinal Harrison Bader drove into the left-field seats, a two-run shot that quieted the fans who had cheered his return to Busch Stadium.

“I knew I hooked it good,” Bader, who also doubled in the ninth inning, said of his first homer as a Twin. “[Gray’s] ball moves a lot. … You just try to slow everything down and be super quiet in the box. Obviously I popped one there, but it doesn’t happen often off of him.”

Especially on Opening Day — those two runs were the most the three-time All-Star had ever allowed in four career Opening Day starts. Gray improved to 3-0 with a 1.08 ERA in season openers, two of them with Oakland and one with Cincinnati.

“He has a great understanding of how to pitch and how to get [hitters to] chase, and how to grab strikes when he can. He’s just a good pitcher,” Baldelli said. “It’s why he’s still having a really nice career and pitching so well.”

One game is useless for drawing any conclusions, but it sure can trigger memories. So it was that in March 2025, the Twins didn’t do much to erase their frustrations of September 2024. Three runs on eight hits, never more than two hits in an inning, and 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position? Sorry, no pages got turned Thursday.

“We were right where we wanted to be in a lot of those situations,” Baldelli said optimistically. “We came through in some of them, did some good things. Didn’t do the same in some other ways.”

The game was delayed by more than 90 minutes by passing showers, but the crowd was amped up by appearances by a dozen members of the Cardinals Hall of Fame and the National Baseball Hall of Fame. And yes, the traditional lap by the Budweiser Clydesdales, too.

All of it set up a disappointing performance by López, who surrendered three singles in the first inning, the last of them, a line drive by designated hitter Alec Burleson, scoring Lars Nootbaar with the game’s first run.

Nootbaar got the crowd chanting “Nooooooot” in the second inning, too, when he drove a two-strike changeup from López a half-dozen rows into the right-field seats, a two-run blast. And in the third inning, López forced all five Cardinals batters to hit ground balls — but three of them got past the Twins’ defense, the last of them, by catcher Iván Herrera, scoring Brendan Donovan and spotting Gray a 4-0 lead.

The Twins struck back with Bader’s home run and, once Gray was lifted after five innings, a walk and two singles in the sixth inning, closing the gap to 4-3. Willi Castro had the critical hit, a two-out double off lefthander John King that scored Trevor Larnach.

But the Cardinals weren’t done, either. Veteran third baseman Nolan Arenado, whom the Cardinals reportedly explored trading over the winter, lofted a fly ball off Twins righthander Griffin Jax in the eighth inning, a drive that landed in the left-field seats.

“Overall, it was what we were looking for. We saw hard-hit balls up the middle and the other way,” Baldelli said. “Up and down the lineup, there are a lot of dots next to guys’ names — those are good at-bats. They don’t always add up, but the way the guys played the game today was what I wanted to see.”