The Twins’ 2025 home debut couldn’t have gone any better. Joe Ryan absolutely dominated Astros hitters, the Twins put runner after runner on base, and the Target Field crowd noise was reaching Metrodome levels.
Yes, it was about as perfect a first inning as they could have scripted. Too bad they played eight more.
Houston needed just six pitches in the second inning to tie the game again on back-to-back homers, capitalized on some good fortune to take the lead in the fourth, and never allowed another Twin to reach third base. The result was the Twins’ second straight home-opener loss, 5-2 to the Astros.
“We did have a nice start. We got some guys on, ran a little bit, made some things happen on the field. Put a couple of runs on the board,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said of the first-inning phenoms. “But we didn’t build on it from there. We had a tough time finding our way on base.”
Baldelli credited Astros starter Hunter Brown for holding the Twins to five hits, just two after the first inning. That’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, but only for one day. The Twins’ offensive sputtering goes back a lot farther than that.
They have been held to three or fewer runs in five of their seven games this year, and are 0-5 in them. They have been limited to five hits or fewer four times already, something that happened 14 times in their final 28 games of 2024. And yes, that’s the worry — that aside from a pair of wins over the White Sox, who allowed more runs than any AL team last season, this year’s Twins still haven’t shaken the offensive doldrums that knocked them out of a playoff spot a season ago.
Those worries seemed miles away after the pregame flyover and Nelson Cruz’s ceremonial first pitch got the crowd buzzing. Ryan took the mound and struck out three straight Astros, two of them All-Stars, with 95-mph stuff.
“I was feeling great. The crowd was awesome the whole time,” Ryan said of whiffing Jose Altuve, Isaac Paredes and Yordan Alvarez, all of them swinging. “I was definitely getting us fired up.”
