It all happened so quickly. It finished so, so slowly.

The Twins looked to be in great shape to finish out a seven-inning doubleheader sweep of the Cardinals and take advantage of a Cleveland loss on Tuesday following Brent Rooker's first career home run and early efficiency from Randy Dobnak. Then, the bottom of the third inning happened. It set career marks (of the bad kind) for Dobnak and made history (of the good kind, somewhat) for Caleb Thielbar.

On the other side of a bizarre frame that began with five consecutive batters reaching base and ended with a 19-pitch at-bat that spanned 10 minutes, the Twins had allowed five runs on only two hits, which turned the script on its head in a 6-4 loss to the Cardinals that secured a split of the one-day, two-game series in St. Louis.

• Box score

"Just very unusual, just the whole feel of it," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "All that being said, we could have probably minimized the damage and helped Dobber get out of there a little bit sooner, too, which hopefully we can do next time around. It was an odd inning and it got even more different when the at-bat with Thielbar went as long as it did.

"But that inning did us in. We just didn't have enough to overcome everything that went on out there."

The Twins head home having won seven of their last nine games. The bizarreness still doesn't end for them, as the club now faces the rarity of back-to-back off-days Wednesday and Thursday. (The good kind of bizarre.). (The good kind of bizarre.)

Dobnak entered that third inning not having allowed a hit. He'd needed only 11 pitches to complete the first inning, then just seven more to retire the side in the second. The wheels suddenly fell off in a way that they never had before in the 25-year-old's Major League career.

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Matt Carpenter singled before Dobnak hit Matt Wieters with a pitch. Harrison Bader walked to load the bases, and Dobnak grazed Tommy Edman with an errant slider for a bases-loaded hit batter. After Paul Goldschmidt struck out, Dobnak got the ground ball he wanted, but catcher Ryan Jeffers didn't have his foot on home plate as he received the throw, resulting in a run-scoring fielder's choice.

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"Some of the action we saw was a little unusual," Baldelli said. "If the hit-by-pitch that glances the guy's foot doesn't actually hit him and we get the out at home plate -- there were things that happened that caused that inning to play out a little bit different," Baldelli said. "Was it clean and perfect? Not even close. But it was just very odd, things continually happening that didn't play out to our advantage."

Rangel Ravelo drove in another with an actual base hit -- an RBI single through a drawn-in infield -- before Tyler O'Neill finally gave Dobnak a second out with a fielder's choice. Thielbar walked Carpenter with the bases loaded to add a fifth run to Dobnak's tally, and he finally ended the downward spiral with his 19-pitch marathon battle against Wieters that marked the longest plate appearance against a Twins pitcher on record (since 1988).

"I'm not really sure exactly what happened that inning," Dobnak said, echoing an identical statement from his manager. "It was just a really strange inning."

The Cardinals made eight plate appearances in that inning with the bases loaded, the most since the Marlins also had eight against the Brewers in 2009, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Dobnak had not hit a batter in '20; he hit two in that inning. He had not walked multiple batters in an inning in his career; he did in that frame. The right-hander had never allowed more than two runs in an inning; that ended, too.

"I couldn't tell you the last time I walked a guy home," Dobnak said. "It's been a really long time since that's happened. The last time I hit two guys in one inning was probably over a year ago. I don't know, but it's a really strange inning. But that's baseball."

The Twins outhit the Cardinals, 7-5, and they had their chance to do some damage beyond Rooker's second-inning homer when they put their first two runners aboard in the fifth. They only got one run out of that on a pair of groundouts and a strikeout, and they failed to gain ground on Cleveland, though they'll have a chance to do that in this weekend's upcoming three-game series at Target Field.

Worth noting

• Rookie right-hander Jorge Alcala exited the sixth inning of the game after being struck in the right shin by a 96.3 mph comebacker by Goldschmidt. The Twins did not have any other immediate updates after Tuesday’s game.