Jacksonville blasts four homers in rain-shortened win over Durham

Jacksonville turned Thursday night at Durham Bulls Athletic Park into a power showcase, blasting four home runs and rolling past Durham 11-5 in a game that was called after seven innings. The Jumbo Shrimp trailed 1-0 before Deyvison De Los Santos snapped the momentum with a two-run homer in the fourth, the first swing in a rally that put the game under Jacksonville’s control.

The Shrimp kept stacking damage inning by inning. After De Los Santos opened the door, Jacksonville added more pressure with homers from Jared Serna, Kemp Alderman and Griffin Conine, and by the time Conine launched a three-run shot in the sixth, the visitors had stretched the margin to 9-2. Durham had no answer for the sequence, and Jacksonville’s lineup kept forcing the Bulls into chase mode long before weather became the final factor.

Durham did find a brief counterpunch in the sixth. Carson Williams and Cooper Kinney each went deep in the inning, trimming the deficit and giving the Bulls a moment of life, but Jacksonville answered again with a seventh-inning run to keep the cushion wide. That made the late rain delay little more than a formality. Heavy rain began as the seventh inning ended, the clubs waited out a 30-minute delay, and the game was then called with Jacksonville comfortably ahead.

The result fit the shape of a team that came in with momentum of its own. Jacksonville entered at 39-32 as the 2025 International League and Triple-A National champion, and the offensive burst looked like the kind of lineup statement that matters in June, especially in a league where a hot week can quickly reshape the standings. Durham dropped to 28-44, and the Bulls were left to absorb a loss that was decided less by one pitcher or one inning than by Jacksonville’s ability to land repeated power shots.

The series was set to continue Friday at 6:45 p.m. ET, with Brandon White scheduled to start for Jacksonville and Mason Englert for Durham. At a park that opened in 1995 and was expanded to 10,000 seats for the 1998 season, the Shrimp had already done the most important thing a road team can do on a weather-threatened night: they made sure the game was theirs before the storm arrived.