Fourteen hits should win a baseball game. On Saturday night at Truist Field, they didn't.
The Charlotte Knights collected fourteen hits against the Nashville Sounds and scored two runs. Nashville collected ten and scored four. That is the whole story. A blowout at least tells you which team was better; this did not. Charlotte was the better team at the plate and lost 4-2, and the loss handed Nashville its first lead of the series, three games to two.
The runs came early and then stopped. Nolan Jones drove in a run with a sacrifice fly in the first. Nashville answered with a run in the second and another in the third to go ahead 2-1. Korey Lee tied it in the fourth with a solo home run to left-center, his 13th of the season. After that, Charlotte did not score again.
It was not for lack of chances. The Knights put runners on in the fifth, the seventh, the eighth, and the ninth, and left all of them there. Nashville scratched across a run in the fifth and added an insurance run in the eighth, and that was enough. Twenty-four hits between the two teams, six total runs. The math is its own kind of losing.
The individual lines were good. Ryan Galanie, Andy Weber, and Lee each had three hits; Dru Baker and Caden Connor each had two. Peyton Pallette and Garrett Schoenle each threw a scoreless inning out of the bullpen and held the deficit at two, close enough for the offense to climb back into it. It never did. The bats are not the problem. The timing is.
And this is now the second night in a row it has been the timing. On Friday the Knights piled up twelve hits and nearly erased a six-run deficit in the ninth before losing by two. Saturday it was fourteen hits and a two-run night. Two games, twenty-six hits, two losses.
That leaves Sunday, and Sunday now decides the series. Nashville leads three games to two. Win the finale and the Knights split six games. Lose it and they give the series away at home. First pitch is 1:05 p.m.
Fourteen hits and two runs is not a slump. It is the odd inverse of one: all the contact a lineup could ask for, almost none of it in the innings that mattered. You only strand that many runners by putting that many on. The Knights will take that trade most nights. Two nights running, it has not paid.