Sunday afternoon at Truist Field, your Charlotte Knights fell behind by four runs, clawed most of the way back, and came up exactly one short. 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 party. Jacob Gonzalez kept doing what he's done all homestand, and the Knights rolled, 12-4, Gonzalez's bat carrying a night 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 Friday night he was the whole show.
Saturday 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 that's exactly what Jacksonville did, pulling away late while the Knights' hits landed in the wrong innings.
Then Sunday, the finale. 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, 6-5. 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 Friday and a 15-run Saturday beating on the same weekend. 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.
Update, June 8: The Knights have not lost since this homestand. They went on to sweep six straight at Durham, seizing the best run differential in Triple-A.
Update, June 15: After the Durham sweep, the Knights split a six-game homestand with the Oklahoma City Comets, three apiece, and clinched a winning first half at 38-31.
Correction, August 22: An earlier version of this story described the 12-4 win and the 6-5 loss as a Sunday doubleheader and placed the 15-6 loss on Friday. Per official league records, the 12-4 win came Friday night, the 15-6 loss came Saturday, and Sunday's finale was a single game. The scores and the 3-3 series result were correct as published.