Long Island steals 12 bases, edges Charleston 4-3 in series finale

Long Island did more than win a strange one in Charleston. The Ducks stole 12 bases, tied the Atlantic League record, and beat the Dirty Birds 4-3 on July 12 at GoMart Ballpark by turning speed into pressure from the first inning to the last.

The game started with runs, then quickly turned into a test of whether Charleston could keep up with Long Island’s legs. Wilmer Difo’s RBI single put the Ducks ahead 1-0 in the second, but Yassel Pino answered with an RBI double and Jaylen Smith followed with a sacrifice fly as the Dirty Birds took a 2-1 lead in the bottom half. From there, every at-bat carried extra stress because the Ducks kept moving, daring Charleston to make perfect throws and perfect decisions.

The seventh inning flipped the score and, really, the whole feel of the night. Kole Kaler tied it with an RBI single, then Gavin Collins punched an opposite-field single to right to bring home the go-ahead run. Long Island added another run in the ninth on Collins’ RBI fielder’s choice, and that insurance mattered when CC Randolph drove in a run in Charleston’s final at-bat to pull the Dirty Birds within one. Rafael Kelly finished it off for his fourth save of the series and the season, keeping the tying run from scoring.

The running game was the headline because it was the identity. Kaler stole four bases, Johnni Turbo added three, Terrell Tatum had two, and Difo, Aaron Takacs and Collins each chipped in one. Long Island’s 12 steals broke its own single-game franchise mark of 10 and tied the league record previously shared by the Gastonia Ghost Peppers, who swiped 12 bases at Charleston last season, and the Dirty Birds, who also reached 12 steals at Hagerstown on June 19. Across the six-game series, the Ducks finished a perfect 33-for-33 on stolen-base attempts, a stretch that said as much about execution as it did about raw speed.

That series line was not built on one novelty night alone. Long Island had already beaten Charleston 4-3 on July 9, when Marcus Chiu and Aaron Takacs completed a double steal, and followed with a 9-2 win on July 10 before closing the set with the 12-steal finale. In a league founded in 1998 and built for unconventional baseball, the Ducks left Charleston with a rare kind of statement: they can manufacture runs one base at a time, and close games with the same certainty.