Let us savor that Opening Day win
The Cardinals’ thrilling comeback victory over the Rays on Thursday gave us much to appreciate
Well, that was something, wasn’t it? No matter how the rest of the 2026 season unfurls, Thursday’s Opening Day tilt against the Rays — a 9-7 Cardinals win — is one we’ll remember for a long time.
For me, the game was an intriguing one even before the first pitch was thrown, and that was because of Oli Marmol’s lineup:
JJ Wetherholt, 2B
Iván Herrera, DH
Alec Burleson, 1B
Masyn Winn, SS
Nolan Gorman, 3B
Jordan Walker, RF
Nathan Church, LF
Pedro Pagés, C
Victor Scott II, CF
As I’ve declared before, I’m partial to lineups that alternate lefties and righties as much as possible in this, the era of the three-batter minimum for relievers. The above goes lefty to righty from top to bottom, with the only lane for a lefty specialist coming at nine to one when the lineup flips.
The most discussion-worthy wrinkle is Winn as the cleanup hitter. He does have a bit of thump, as he tallied 15 homers as a second-year rookie in 2024, and there’s hope for improvement now that he’s had his knee surgically repaired. Let it be noted that Winn on Thursday had a 104-mph double in the game-turning bottom of the sixth and in the eighth lined out on a batted ball that had an expected batting average of .650. On the day, Winn’s average exit velocity was 93.4 mph.
No, I’m not declaring him to be a central-casting cleanup hitter based on a single game; I’m merely saying that he acquitted himself just fine there in the opener. The real point of putting him there was to allow Herrera to bat second while maintaining the lefty-righty stagger, and that’s the best spot for a team’s best hitter, which Herrera probably is (although Burleson may eventually have something to say about this). The hope is that Walker at some point is able to rise to that cleanup role and give the four spot more power than Winn has while, again, preserving the lefty-righty nature of the lineup. It’s of course tempting to want Gorman in Winn’s spot, but I don’t like having your three-four hitters vulnerable to being platoon-disadvantaged by a reliever in crucial middle or late innings. With all this said, there will probably quite a bit of fluidity to Marmol’s lineups, at least for the initial weeks of the season.
As for the game itself, the early headline was Wetherholt’s first big-league home run, which came in his second big-league plate appearance:
