Gwinnett edges Nashville 6-5 after wild ninth-inning defensive miscue

Nashville did enough at the plate to keep the game alive, but one errant decision in the ninth inning turned a winnable night into a 6-5 loss at Gwinnett Field. The Sounds had already trimmed a three-run deficit and were one clean final frame away from stealing the series game, only for a risky throw to third to open the door for the Stripers’ winning run.

Gwinnett built the early cushion in the third, when Robert Gasser lost the zone and the Stripers cashed in with a four-run burst. Aaron Schunk supplied the biggest blow with a two-run homer that pushed Nashville into a 4-0 hole. Gasser, who entered the night with a 0-0 record and a 4.00 ERA over 9.0 innings, finished with 3.1 innings, four runs, seven hits and four strikeouts. After opening his season with an 11-strikeout start in Norfolk, this outing showed how quickly contact and pressure can unravel a Triple-A plan when the defense has to play from behind.

Nashville started its climb in the fourth. Luis Lara kept his strong start rolling with another hit, Luke Adams reached behind him, and Jeferson Quero drove in Lara with a groundout to get the Sounds on the board. In the fifth, Greg Jones singled, Leonard ripped a double and Jones scored to cut the margin to 4-2 before the inning ran out of steam. Gwinnett later extended the lead to 5-2, but Nashville still had enough life to make the finish tense.

The biggest swing for the Sounds came in the eighth, when Brock Wilken launched his first career Triple-A home run to pull Nashville within 5-4. For the 23-year-old third baseman, a 2023 first-round pick by Milwaukee out of Wake Forest, it was the kind of impact moment that can change how a club evaluates a young bat. It also matched the tone of the previous night, when Nashville had snapped its skid with a 6-3 win behind Eddys Leonard’s two-homer game.

The ninth offered one more opening. Jacob Hurtubise, back in the Nashville lineup and collecting his first hit of the season in a Sounds uniform, reached to start the inning. But the comeback unraveled on the decisive play, when a throw to third went awry and allowed the winning run to score. In a six-game series that had already featured Gwinnett’s record 10 stolen bases in the opener and Jim Jarvis’ four-steal night, the margin for defensive error was already thin. Nashville’s bats kept it close; the defense gave it away.