Lee's walk-off single lifts Charlotte past Gwinnett 10-9

Korey Lee ended the chaos with one swing, lining a walk-off RBI single to left-center off James Karinchak and sending Charlotte past Gwinnett 10-9 in a game that kept flipping long after the first pitch.

The Knights had already spent the weekend making a point. One day after crushing the Stripers 21-1 with seven home runs, Charlotte had to win a completely different kind of game, one built on patience, damage in bursts and a ninth-inning finish. Gwinnett led 8-4 midway through the eighth, then Charlotte ripped off the kind of rally that turns a sleepy Sunday into a reminder that no lead is safe at Truist Field.

LaMonte Wade Jr. and Lee opened the comeback with back-to-back homers in the eighth to pull Charlotte within one and put the pressure back on Gwinnett’s bullpen. The Stripers answered in the ninth when Rowdy Tellez tied it 9-9, but Charlotte did not blink. The Knights loaded the bases in the bottom half, and Lee delivered again, driving in the winning run and turning a slugfest into a walk-off.

The box score was loaded with the kind of numbers that explain why this game never settled down. Lee finished 3-for-6 with a homer and two RBIs, while Wade went 2-for-5 with a homer and three RBIs. On the other side, Gwinnett’s Brett Wisely came within a home run of the cycle, going 3-for-5 with a double, triple and three RBIs. The Stripers also got all four of their homers from DaShawn Keirsey Jr., Chadwick Tromp and Tellez, with Keirsey Jr. leaving twice.

It was the rare series that swung from one extreme to another without losing its edge. Charlotte’s 21-1 rout in the previous game featured 22 hits and a franchise-record seven-homer loss for Gwinnett, then the Knights followed it with a one-run win decided in the final at-bat. The split of the six-game set, 3-3, reflected just how volatile the matchup was. Charlotte improved to 16-17, Gwinnett fell to 20-13, and 6,168 fans watched the whole thing unfold in 2 hours, 50 minutes. Lee, who entered the next week with five homers and 12 RBIs, looked like exactly the bat Charlotte wanted at the plate when the game was hanging by a thread.