Salt Lake rallies past Round Rock, hands Express 7-1 loss

Round Rock finally got the first punch, and then Salt Lake took the fight away.

The Express opened with a first-inning run at Dell Diamond when Cody Freeman walked, Blaine Crim reached on an error and Diego Castillo lined an opposite-field RBI single to score Freeman. That was the high point for Round Rock’s offense. By the time the third inning ended, Salt Lake had turned the game into a 7-1 rout and left the Express searching for answers again.

The flip came fast. Salt Lake put up five runs in the third, starting with Christian Moore’s triple and followed by Denzer Guzman’s RBI single, Trey Mancini’s two-run double and Bryce Teodosio’s RBI single. One inning changed everything. The Bees then tacked on another run in the fourth and one more in the sixth, with Guzman delivering the final insurance shot on a double that pushed the lead to 7-1.

For Round Rock, the damage was not just in the scoreboard but in the silence that followed its opening frame. The Express were held hitless from the first inning until Jonah Bride’s single in the eighth, and they reached base only seven times after the opening inning, six of them on walks. That is how a game that started with promise became a familiar opening-night letdown.

The loss dropped Round Rock to 20-31 and 11 games back of first-place Sacramento, and it continued a rough pattern in series openers. The Express are now 3-7 in series openers, 1-4 in home openers for series and 7-18 at home. They also fell to 2-25 when scoring fewer than five runs, a blunt stat that explains how little margin this offense has been giving itself when it does manage an early lead.

Salt Lake, meanwhile, arrived after a 12-game homestand and was making its only 2026 visit to Dell Diamond. The Bees already knew how to handle this matchup, having gone 7-5 against Round Rock in 2025 after winning the road series in August and splitting a six-game set in Salt Lake in June.

The reunion angle belonged to Salt Lake manager Doug Davis, who spent the previous three seasons running Round Rock from 2023 to 2025. Davis finished his Express tenure with a 237-210 record, guided the club to its first Pacific Coast League Championship appearance since 2019 and oversaw a franchise-record 89-win season. Back in the same park, he watched his current club seize control in the middle innings, and Round Rock never made it competitive again.