Sunday afternoon at Truist Field, your Charlotte Knights put up a dozen runs in the first game of a doubleheader and lost the second one anyway. That's baseball, folks. Six games against the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, and when the dust cleared, nobody had won anything. Three apiece.
Let me back up.
The homestand wobbled to its finish over the weekend. Friday night was the kind of game you forget on purpose — Jacksonville 15, Charlotte 6. And here's the thing: the Knights weren't even shut down. They put fourteen hits on the board. Fourteen! You can collect fourteen hits and lose by nine if the other guys keep stringing theirs together at the right time, and all weekend Jacksonville kept doing exactly that when it counted, pulling away late while the Knights' hits landed in the wrong innings.
Then Sunday, the doubleheader. Game one was a party. Jacob Gonzalez kept doing what he's done all homestand, and the Knights rolled, 12-4 — Gonzalez's bat carrying a day that included his 19th home run of the year. Twelve runs. That's not nothing. The kid has been the best thing about this stretch of baseball, and on Sunday afternoon he was the whole show.
And then they played game two and lost it 6-5.
Charlotte fell behind by four and clawed back — because of course they did, that's the whole personality of this team, down four and still dangerous — and came up one run short at the end. Rally, fall short, shake hands, go home. The split was sealed.
So the six-game set with Jacksonville ends even. Three for the Knights, three for the Jumbo Shrimp, a homestand that gave you a 12-run Sunday and a 15-run Friday loss in the same week. Charlotte stays right in the thick of it.
The Knights hit the road Tuesday — down to Durham, the Bulls, the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. New series, new state, same question every night: which version of this team shows up. See you down at the ballgame.