South Carolina baseball not ready for the big moment, yet
Friday night was a big night for South Carolina baseball. New coach Mark Kingston hopes there are more of them during his tenure and that his team handles them better.
The Gamecocks dropped their season opener and Kingston’s debut 7-6 to VMI on Friday night in front of 7,384 fans in Founders Park.
“I think they wanted to do so well tonight for that big crowd, and they just were trying to do too much,” Kingston said. “We talked about that. If you’re at South Carolina, you need to be calm in the moment.”
This is a program that is built on big moments. The lack of them of late is why Kingston is here and why Friday night was a big deal for a fan base still pining for the glory days of the back-to-back national titles in 2010 and 2011. South Carolina fans want the new guy to get this team back to Omaha. It’ll have to play better than it did Friday, when ace Adam Hill was chased after four innings, having given up seven runs, and the South Carolina batters left 15 runners on base.
“We struck out too many times with runners in scoring position,” Kingston said. “Guys got really excited with (Jacob Olson’s) big home run in the first inning and then started over-swinging. It’s fine to let the bat head fly with less than two strikes, but guys were too big with two strikes tonight, and that’s why we lost the game.”
The Gamecocks scored four runs in the first and only two in the final eight innings.
“We were a little bit too aggressive. We were amped up for the first game,” senior shortstop Madison Stokes said. “It was inexcusable.”
South Carolina started the game 5-for-5 with runners on base. It went 1-for-17 in that situation to close the game, though. The Gamecocks left the bases loaded in both the seventh and the eighth innings.
“We hit a ton of balls hard,” Kingston said. “At times, there were guys trying to do too much with two strikes, period. You have to battle better with two strikes.”
Battling at the plate was a big part of the Gamecocks’ problem last year. They finished 10th in the SEC in batting, and not a single player finished the season with a .300 batting average. They came into the season with much more confidence at the plate, Stokes said.
On Friday, they might have had too much.
“If there were any butterflies or anything, they are all gone,” Olson said. “It’s time to move forward.”
The next moment is waiting.
This story was originally published February 16, 2018 at 8:39 PM with the headline "South Carolina baseball not ready for the big moment, yet."