Notes: Georgia heroics helped Brown earn the mound

GREENVILLE, N.C. —- South Carolina will turn its fate over to fifth-year senior right-hander Jay Brown tonight in the one-game showdown for the Greenville Regional title.

Brown (3-0, 3.30 earned run average) spent much of the regular season as the midweek starter. All seven of his starts came against in-state opponents, including one against Clemson.

Three of Brown’s other four appearances were against Southeastern Conference competition, including his best outing of the year to close out the regular season against Georgia. Brown went six innings, allowing Georgia one run on three hits.

That outing is a big reason USC coach Ray Tanner has confidence in sending Brown into the biggest game of the season.

“I think Jay Brown has positioned himself to have this start (tonight),” Tanner said. “Hopefully, he’ll go out and have a great outing. I feel good about sending him out there (tonight). It’s certainly not going to be easy for him. He’s going to have to be really good.”

Brown recently gained a sixth-year of eligibility for a medical redshirt year.

ECU coach Billy Godwin had not decided on his starter Sunday night.

Fantastic freshman. Right-fielder Jackie Bradley put an exclamation point on his first season with the Gamecocks by etching his name in the USC record book. With seven hits in the first three games of the NCAA regional, he set the freshman record for hits in a season. With 87 hits and counting entering Sunday’s game, Bradley passed former shortstop Drew Meyer, who collected 82 hits in 2000.

Through the first two games of the regional, Bradley was batting .348 with 10 homers and 44 RBI. The Prince George, Va., native also has scored a team-high 68 runs and played extremely well on the defensive end.

Odom sighting. Former USC basketball coach Dave Odom attended Saturday’s game against East Carolina as a guest of ECU athletics director Terry Holland. The two are friends from when Odom coached under Holland at Virginia.

Odom, whose North Carolina beach house is not far from Greenville, drove in for Saturday’s game along with his wife Lynn and two other couples. Odom was the coach at East Carolina from 1979-82 and at USC from 2000 through 2008.

Odom visited with USC athletics director Eric Hyman and Tanner during his visit, then called Holland for updates of Sunday’s games while he was fishing off the North Carolina coast.

Rolling it out. ECU designated hitter Kyle Roller drilled two home runs in the Pirates’ eight-run rally in the fifth inning of the 16-9 victory against Binghamton. The two blasts gave him a team-high 15 on the season.

“Honestly, on the first home run, I was just trying to put the ball in play with two strikes,” he said. “He left a changeup over the plate, and I was kind of out on my front foot. But I got the best of it, and the wind helped me out.”

Roller followed that performance with a three-run blast in the first inning of the evening game against USC.

Birdseed. USC’s Whit Merrifield extended his hitting streak to 13 games with a sixth-inning line single to center field. æ.æ.æ. Bradley added two more sensational catches in Sunday’s game. After robbing George Mason’s leadoff hitter of a home run in the first inning of the first game on Friday, Bradley made a running catch at the fence in right-center field off the bat of East Carolina’s Jared Avchen in the second inning Sunday, then made a sliding catch of a fly ball off Drew Schieber’s bat in the seventh inning.