Brandon White tosses one-hit gem as Jumbo Shrimp beat Bulls 5-3

Brandon White owned the night from the first inning on, and the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp rode his one-hit gem to a 5-3 win over the Durham Bulls on Friday at Durham Bulls Athletic Park. White tied his career high with 11 strikeouts in seven scoreless innings, and after Carson Williams dropped in a two-out bloop single in the first, White never let Durham reach base again.

That kind of command flipped the game almost immediately. Jacksonville got an unearned run in the first on a Carson Williams fielding error, then Johnny Olmstead added a solo homer in the second to push the lead to 2-0. White kept carving through Durham’s lineup, retiring the final 19 batters he faced and never allowing the Bulls to build even a hint of rhythm.

The Shrimp kept layering on pressure against Mason Englert, who took the loss after allowing three runs, two earned, over six innings. Jacksonville scored again in the sixth, then Graham Pauley broke it open in the eighth with a two-run single that made it 5-0 and all but buried Durham’s chances. For a Bulls club trying to stay in the race, it was the kind of night where every small mistake got magnified by White’s efficiency on the other side.

Durham finally cracked the scoreboard in the ninth when Oliver Dunn launched a three-run homer and Logan Driscoll singled to keep the inning alive, but Zach Pop needed just one pitch to get the final out and lock down the save. The late push made the final score look closer than the game felt for most of the night, because White had already taken the air out of the building.

The win moved Jacksonville to 40-32 and dropped Durham to 28-44, a gap that showed on the field as much as it did in the standings. White, a 26-year-old right-hander from Olympia, Washington, was making just his fifth Triple-A start after Miami drafted him in the 12th round out of Washington State in 2021. Englert, also 26, brought MLB experience to the mound for Durham, but he could not match White’s edge. The Bulls lost for the third straight time, while Jacksonville kept building toward the first-half run that eventually ended with an International League title and the club’s first postseason berth since 2017. The series was set to continue Saturday night at 6:45 p.m. ET.