Nashville uses six pitchers to beat Jacksonville, earn series split

Nashville did not win this series finale with a burst of offense. It won it by shrinking the game until Jacksonville had nowhere to breathe, then by cashing in just enough power to make a 3-1 lead stand at VyStar Ballpark.

Six Sounds pitchers combined to strand 10 Jumbo Shrimp runners and hold Jacksonville to 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position, a run-prevention effort that defined the afternoon. Easton McGee set the tone with three hitless innings, striking out three and walking one in his second start of the series, and the rest of the staff kept handing off the same problem to the next arm without letting it get bigger.

The early offensive jolt came from Luke Adams, who homered for the second straight game and for the third time in the series. His shot on an 86 mph cutter carried 402 feet to left field and put Nashville in front 1-0, a lead that mattered immediately because Jacksonville had been leaning on its own pitching all weekend and had already taken a one-run game the day before behind Karson Milbrandt’s Triple-A debut.

Jacksonville answered in the fourth when Agustin Ramirez drove an RBI double, but the Sounds kept making the home team work for every inch. Nashville’s best sequence came in the eighth, when Cooper Pratt singled, stole second, moved to third on a wild pitch and scored on a double steal after a walk to Adams. That kind of pressure baseball, not a three-run swing, pushed the Sounds back ahead and turned a one-run game into one Jacksonville could not fully recover from.

Eddys Leonard added the final blow in the ninth, jumping on the second pitch he saw for his team-leading ninth homer. Leonard had entered the game with eight home runs and had been stuck in a 2-for-32 skid, so the insurance blast mattered twice over: it gave Nashville breathing room and snapped him out of a stretch that could have lingered.

The 3-1 finish gave Nashville a split in a six-game set that had already swung back and forth, including Jacksonville’s 4-3 win on Graham Pauley’s three-run homer and Nashville’s 8-3 response after a six-run third inning. For a Sounds club sitting at 37-25 in the matchup, the finale suggested something more useful than a one-day result: if the bats are ordinary, six pitchers and clean baserunning can still carry a night.