Promising start spoiled as Astros pitchers shut down Twins 5-2

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.”

BOXSCORE: Houston 5, Twins 2

Matt Wallner did, too. The Twins’ leadoff hitter launched a 93-mph cutter from Brown 386 feet to the wall in right-center. When he spotted the ball take an odd bounce and catch the bottom of the padding, he hustled to third base, his third career triple.

Wallner scored on Carlos Correa’s groundout to short. Byron Buxton then reached base on a short looper that landed behind Brown, and he stole second base, allowing him to score easily on Trevor Larnach’s sharp single to left.

“It got loud out there,” Ryan said of the crowd’s celebration. “It was cold, but it didn’t matter to the fans.”

Ryan cooled their passion rather suddenly, with a couple of pitches he regretted.

Christian Walker bashed a Ryan fastball 401 feet into the upper deck, Jeremy Peña just 11 feet shorter and into the lower deck, the first time Ryan has ever allowed back-to-back homers. Six pitches into the second inning, the Twins’ lead was gone, and so was their mojo.

“Just tried to make an adjustment on the sweeper [to Walker]. It didn’t really sweep, kind of stayed there,” Ryan said. “Kind of the same thing on Peña — [after] a swing-and-miss, tried to climb the ladder and he was just ready for it.”

The loss was hardly Ryan’s fault, though he suffered a handful of hiccups, besides the sudden homers, that cost him. He hit Walker with a pitch in the fourth inning, then a one-out single to Astros catcher Victor Caratini. A balk — only the second of Ryan’s career — moved the runners up, a critical error when second baseman Brendan Rodgers followed with a ground ball up the middle through the Twins’ drawn-in infield. Carlos Correa dove but couldn’t reach it, and both Astros scored.

The Astros tagged on another run on Caratini and Rodgers’ back-to-back doubles off Louie Varland in the sixth inning.

The Twins didn’t collect a hit after the third inning, and their brief two-game winning streak was over.

“You want to just carry it on, of course. But sometimes you run into pitching like that,” Baldelli said. “You’ve got to kind of pack it in and get ready for the next game. I’m not really harping on disappointment. I’m more interested in what we do over the off day, getting ready and showing up Saturday ready to play.”