Six runs in one inning will close a road trip in a hurry. Your Charlotte Knights piled them up in the fifth Sunday afternoon at 121 Financial Ballpark, ran away from the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp 9-4, and finished a six-game road trip the way nobody in this town saw coming a week ago — with two straight wins and a series finale that wasn't close after the middle innings.
Carlos Pérez did most of the damage. Two-run home run in the fourth to cut the deficit to 4-2. Two-run single in the fifth as part of the inning that turned everything around. FOUR runs batted in on the day. The veteran catcher had been quiet most of the trip, and then on the last day of it, he was the loudest bat in the lineup.
Down 4-2 going to the fifth, the Knights sent the order through and didn't let up. Pérez's two-run single tied the game. Wynton Bernard drove in two more. Danny Mendick drove in two more. Six runs. One inning. Ballgame.
And here's the thing — the pitching held up the entire back half. Johan Domínguez gave the Knights 3.2 innings, allowed all four Jacksonville runs on eight hits, and walked off without a decision. Then Aaron McGarity came on out of the bullpen, threw 1.1 scoreless, picked up the win, and ran his record to 1-0 (the ERA still says 13.50 — we'll call it a work in progress). Chase Plymell followed with two scoreless innings. Charlotte relievers combined for 5.1 scoreless frames to close out the series. After Domínguez handed off the ball in the fourth, the Jumbo Shrimp didn't score again.
That's two straight games where the Charlotte arms did the heavy lifting. Saturday night, Shane Smith turned in the kind of start every minor-league pitching coach dreams about: five innings, one hit, two walks, five strikeouts, 83 pitches, the first Charlotte shutout of the season, and a 2-0 win that snapped a four-game losing streak. Ben Peoples threw two scoreless after him. Tyler Davis closed it. The first four games of the trip had been brutal — three runs or fewer in every one of those losses, the offense sleepwalking, the bullpen leaking late. Then Smith got the ball Saturday and the whole trip turned around.
Look. The series still belongs to Jacksonville. The Jumbo Shrimp won the first four. They took the set 4-2. Nobody in the Charlotte clubhouse is going to pretend a 2-4 road series that included a four-game skid is anything but exhausting. But baseball is a long season, and the way you finish a trip matters. You can come home dragging or you can come home with a couple of W's in your back pocket. The Knights chose option B.
A few names worth mentioning. Bernard's two-RBI afternoon was the kind of contribution that doesn't show up in a headline but absolutely shows up in the standings. Mendick has been steady and quietly turned in another two-RBI day. And while we're at it — Rikuu Nishida, the recently-acquired second baseman, hit a solo home run in his Charlotte debut Friday night, the only run of an otherwise lost ballgame. Keep an eye on the kid. He's got a swing.
Manager Chad Pinder finishes his first month at the helm with a road trip he'll remember for the back end of it more than the front. Six games in Jacksonville, and the Knights came out of it with the bats waking up at the right time and a bullpen that stacked two clean outings back to back. That's not nothing.
Next up: a six-game series against the Syracuse Mets. The boys get a day off Monday — earned, by anyone's count — before the next set begins. The Mets are a different challenge. Different lineup, different approach. But the Knights are walking off the plane with momentum for the first time since Opening Weekend, and momentum in this league has a way of carrying.
Six runs in the fifth. Pérez with the big swings. McGarity with the win. Smith's shutout the night before that started the whole thing.
That's how you close a road trip, folks.