Lara, Sounds back Gasser in 9-3 win over Iowa

Luis Lara kept forcing his name into the box score, and Nashville kept feeding off it. The Sounds opened their six-game set against Iowa with a 9-3 win Tuesday night at First Horizon Park, piling up 13 hits and getting multi-hit nights from four hitters in a showing that looked less like a one-off burst and more like a lineup built to wear opponents down.

The game tilted in the first inning, when Iowa scratched out an unearned run against Robert Gasser. That was the last clean window the Cubs really had. Gasser settled in immediately, rolling through the second and third with scoreless frames and giving Nashville the kind of early stability that lets an offense keep pressing instead of playing from behind. By the time the middle innings arrived, Iowa was chasing contact all over the park while the Sounds were stacking at-bats from top to bottom.

Lara was at the center of it again. The switch-hitting outfielder finished as one of Nashville’s four multi-hit performers and was credited with his seventh three-hit game of the season, a number that says more about his current run than any single night can. The 21-year-old has been moving fast through the Brewers system since signing out of Venezuela for $1.1 million, and this was the kind of game that explains why the organization keeps betting on his bat. He has already put together multiple three-hit games earlier in April, and this latest one fit the same pattern: quality contact, repeated pressure, and production that does not depend on one swing.

That matters for Nashville’s bigger picture. The Sounds entered at 20-19, Iowa at 18-20, and the Cubs came in having gone 5-2 against left-handed starters, but Gasser checked that early edge and kept the game within Nashville’s reach. The left-hander, born May 31, 1999, and drafted 71st overall by San Diego in 2021 out of the University of Houston, worked four innings in his second home start of the season and gave the offense room to breathe. Reiss Knehr finished the job with two no-hit relief innings, earning his second win of the season and keeping Iowa from ever finding a response.

Nashville’s home form has been a big part of the early-season picture, and this win pushed the Sounds to 13-5 at First Horizon Park, the ballpark that opened in spring 2015 in Germantown. More important than the record was the way this one unfolded: not one giant inning, but repeated contact, repeated traffic, and enough depth in the order to make Iowa absorb six different threats before the night was over. That is the kind of offense that can travel through a six-game series and keep getting louder.