Memphis opens with early surge, holds off Gwinnett’s late rally

Memphis nearly gave away a game it had controlled from the first inning, but Chris Roycroft shut the door in the ninth and turned a late Gwinnett surge into a 4-3 Redbirds win at AutoZone Park.

The Stripers had the tying run on third with nobody out in the ninth before Roycroft recorded his first save of the season. It preserved a victory that Memphis built immediately, then spent the next eight innings protecting against a Gwinnett team that kept finding ways to stay alive. The loss dropped Gwinnett to 0-4 against Memphis this season, with three of those four defeats coming by one run.

The Redbirds opened with a first-inning burst that changed the tone before the game settled. César Prieto launched a two-run homer, his fourth of the season and the shot that tied him for the Memphis team lead, and Leo Bernal followed with a long sacrifice fly as Memphis raced to a 4-0 lead. The first-inning damage fit a larger pattern for the Redbirds, who had outscored opponents 15-3 in first innings at that point in the season.

Gwinnett answered in pieces. Brett Wisely, whose opposite-field solo homer in the fifth was his first as a member of the Stripers, added a double in the ninth as the comeback gathered speed. Jim Jarvis drove in a run, stole two bases and scored on a wild pitch, stretching his run of reaching base safely to 16 straight games to start the season while improving to 12-for-12 on stolen-base attempts.

Didier Fuentes gave Gwinnett the kind of length that usually keeps a team in the fight, setting a single-game career high with 7.0 innings. His previous high was 6.0 innings, a mark he had reached five times, but the early four-run hole left little room for error. Memphis starter Hunter Dobbins, working in his third MLB rehab start of 2026, held the Stripers to one run over five innings and kept the Redbirds ahead until the bullpen could take over.

That was the edge Memphis needed in a game that carried more weight than a single April result. Prieto and Bernal continued to give the Redbirds middle-order thump, Dobbins added another encouraging rehab line, and Roycroft finished a contest Gwinnett kept trying to pry open until the final out.