Saints power past Bats 6-4 in series opener
Culpepper’s leadoff blast and St. Paul’s seven doubles turned a close game into a lesson in efficiency as Louisville stranded too many chances in a 6-4 loss.
Kaelen Culpepper set the tone before Louisville could settle in, launching the first pitch he saw for a leadoff homer and putting St. Paul ahead in a game that soon became about who finished chances and who wasted them. The Saints went on to beat the Bats 6-4 Tuesday night at Louisville Slugger Field, opening the six-game series with a cleaner, sharper attack that never needed many openings to do damage.
Culpepper’s drive was his 11th home run of the season and his fifth leadoff homer, tying for the Minor League lead in that category. St. Paul added two doubles in the next five batters and built a quick 2-0 lead, then kept pressuring a Louisville pitching staff that could not afford long stretches without an answer. By the end of the night, the Saints had 10 hits and eight of them went for extra bases, including a franchise-record-tying seven doubles.
Louisville did show some life in the first. Edwin Arroyo opened the frame with a single, swiped his ninth base of the season and later scored in a rally that also included a walk to Héctor Rodríguez and Michael Toglia’s opposite-field double. A wild pitch brought Rodríguez home and tied the game, but the Saints immediately reclaimed control in the third, using a pair of doubles to regain the lead and keep the Bats on the ropes.
That was the pattern all night. Louisville kept scratching, but St. Paul kept responding. Noelvi Marte’s RBI single in the fifth ended the Bats’ scoreless stretch and pushed the Saints back in front by two. Louisville trimmed the gap again in the sixth when Austin Hendrick laced a hard-hit double and Will Banfield brought him home with a single, but the Bats still trailed 6-4 and never fully cashing in their ninth-inning chance. The score stayed close; the efficiency did not.
Sam Benschoter started for Louisville, while Julian Garcia ran into trouble in his second inning of work. Zach McCambley made his Reds organizational debut in relief and escaped a jam with a 6-4-3 double play before handling later traffic on his own. Louisville entered the night leading the International League with a .285 batting average, 11 points better than the next closest club, but the Bats could not turn that contact advantage into enough runs against a Saints lineup that came in tied with them for third in the league in scoring.
The series continued Wednesday at 11:05 a.m. CT, and Louisville will need to make its hits count faster if it wants to avoid seeing the same story repeat itself.
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