Sounds break through with six-run third, snap Jumbo Shrimp streak

The game flipped in a blur in the third inning, when Nashville sent 11 batters to the plate and stacked six runs on Jacksonville before the Jumbo Shrimp could steady themselves. That burst carried the Sounds to an 8-3 win Thursday night at VyStar Ballpark, snapping Jacksonville’s four-game winning streak and turning a series that had started badly for Nashville into a live fight again.

Nashville came in at 36-24 and had already watched Jacksonville take the first two games, 6-2 on June 2 and 3-2 on June 3. This one looked similar until the Sounds’ lineup started rolling. Ethan Murray and Tyler Black opened the third with singles, Cooper Pratt followed with an RBI hit, and Jett Williams delivered the swing that really bent the inning with a two-run triple. Akil Baddoo added a run-scoring groundout, Jeferson Quero and Luis Matos kept the line moving by reaching base, and Ramón Rodríguez capped the rally with an RBI single. Murray even came back around for another hit in the inning, a good snapshot of how deep the damage ran.

That kind of inning is not just a hot streak, it is a stress test for a pitching staff. Jacksonville starter Brandon White took the loss, and the Shrimp never quite found the clean answer after Nashville’s barrage. The Sounds finished with 13 hits, a better sign than the six-run total itself, because it showed the rally was built on contact, not just one swing that hid a quiet night.

Jacksonville did trim the margin with walks, double steals and RBI hits from Brian Navarreto, but Nashville kept matching moves instead of letting the game drift into a tense finish. Brett Wichrowski earned the win in his first career Triple-A start, a useful night for a club trying to see whether this road swing can still tilt in its favor.

The final push came in the eighth, when Murray and Black again helped set the table and Pratt lashed a triple into the left-center gap for two insurance runs. That mattered because it kept a still-competitive game from becoming a one-run nail-biter. The crowd of 7,680 saw a series tone change in real time, and Nashville left with the cleaner answer. Jacksonville answered back the next night with a 4-3 win on Graham Pauley’s three-run homer, but on June 4 the Sounds looked less like a team searching for offense and more like one that may have found an adjustment.