ATLANTA — For one of the few times in the past dozen years, the Cardinals will open the regular season at home for 2025, but the schedule is not without a modern twist.
The Cardinals host the Minnesota Twins on opening day March 27 at Busch Stadium. That begins a three-game visit from the American League club and the start of a schedule that has the Cardinals completing three interleague series before playing a team from their own league.
They’ll visit Fenway Park before their first National League series.
Their season will end with September weekend at Wrigley Field.
Major League Baseball and the Cardinals released the 2025 schedule Thursday afternoon. As part of the current collective bargaining agreement, all 30 teams play at least one series against each other, so there is no longer the rotation of interleague foes by division. The locations of the interleague series just swap from year to year so that in odd years the Cardinals visit Boston and host the Yankees, and in even years they head to the Bronx and welcome the Red Sox to ºüÀêÊÓƵ, as examples.
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Because the Athletics visit ºüÀêÊÓƵ on Sept. 1-3, the Cardinals will play a regular-season series in Sacramento, California, at the earliest in 2026, if the A’s remain there. The 2025 schedule does identify the Athletics as ATH because they will no longer call Oakland (OAK) home.
The 2025 season will be the Cardinals’ second opening day at home in the past three seasons, though before that, they would go years without hosting opening day. Since 2012, the Cardinals opened a regularly scheduled season on the road nine times and hosted on MLB’s opening day only twice.
The Cardinals prefer to limit home games in April because of the chilly or rainy weather and the difficulty selling tickets when school is in session.
They will have five home series in March and April, hosting the Twins (March 27-30), the Angels (March 31-April 2), Philadelphia (April 11-13), Houston (April 14-16) and division rival Milwaukee for the first time (April 25-27).
The Cardinals will have the Fourth of July weekend at Wrigley against their rival Cubs, and they will not return there until the final series of the regular season, Sept. 26-28. The Cardinals host the Cubs for a four-game weekday series at Busch Stadium from June 23-26, and the Cubs return for their second and final regular-season visit Aug. 8-10, a weekend.
The Cubs begin their 2025 season with a series against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Japan. That will also mark Shohei Ohtani’s return with his new team and perhaps his return to the mound as a two-way player after recovering from elbow surgery.
The Cardinals have expressed interest in some day playing a regular-season game in Asia. They’ve participated in the London Series in 2023 and played this past month at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama.
The Cardinals’ 2025 schedule is kind to their travel and could lead to some creative decisions between road series.
They have multiple road trips when they can avoid flying between series, opting to take a bus, train or, if they prefer, a caravan of cars.
In June, the Cardinals have a four-game road series in Milwaukee and then bop down to the Southside to visit the Chicago White Sox. Later that same month, the Cardinals visit Cleveland for a three-game series and then can elect to drive the two hours for their second and final visit to Pittsburgh’s PNC Park of the regular season.
That three-city road trip ends at Wrigley for Independence Day.
The Cardinals also have paired road series between San Diego and Los Angeles, and in May, they play the Washington Nationals and Philadelphia Phillies in consecutive road series. It was back in 2009 that the Cardinals took a train from Washington to Philadelphia between series and, at the same time, completed a trade for outfielder and future Cardinals Hall of Famer Matt Holliday.
MLB is also introducing “Rivalry Weekend.†That May 16-18 event will feature 11 series between “prime interleague rivals†and four additional regional rivalries that are within the same league, such as Pittsburgh facing Philly.
That weekend, the Cardinals will visit Kansas City for a Show-Me Showdown.
The All-Star Game will be July 15 in Atlanta. The Midsummer Classic heads to Truist Park in suburban Atlanta four years after Major League Baseball made the in-season decision to relocate the game to Colorado and Coors Field amid criticism of Georgia’s change to voter laws. The MLB draft is also set to be held in Atlanta, likely starting the weekend before the 95th All-Star Game.
The times and broadcast schedule for all of the 2025 games will be announced at another time.