'Believe it's gonna happen.' Gamecocks fight recent history to find baseball success
Nearly half of South Carolina’s 25 losses last season came by one run or in extra innings. First-year coach Mark Kingston wasn’t in Columbia then, but he doesn’t ignore recent history.
During tight games this season, Kingston has found himself uttering the same phrase in the USC dugout: “Believe it’s gonna happen, believe it’s gonna happen.”
The Gamecocks (13-8, 1-2 SEC) are off to their worst start since 1996. Their 4-3 loss to The Citadel on Tuesday dropped them to 1-4 in one-run games.
Carolina, as Kingston alluded to this week, is still seeking a breakthrough. It travels to Georgia (15-6, 2-1) this weekend. Game one is 7 p.m. Friday.
“Confidence is a big thing in our sport,” Kingston said during a news conference at Founders Park. “When you have confidence, it does carry over individually and as a team.
“As you start to win some of those close games, it builds on itself. You gain momentum, you feel like it’s going to come your way. So, right now, I feel like in the dugout I’m telling guys, ‘Believe it’s gonna happen, believe it’s gonna happen.’ When it finally does, I’ll be able to stop saying that and they’ll just know it by themselves.
“But it’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Perhaps a few Sunday afternoons could have already started the transformation.
USC on March 4 dropped the rubber game to Clemson, 8-7, when Carmen Mlodzinski allowed a walk-off RBI triple to Drew Wharton. Two weeks later, with another opportunity to win a series, the Gamecocks left 10 runners on base in a 3-2 loss to Florida.
Both Florida (No. 2) and Clemson (No. 12) are ranked in this week’s Baseball America poll.
“If we’ve been getting blown out by seven or eight runs,” Kingston said, “and that’s how most of our losses have happened, then I think we could all say, ‘We need to mail it in.’ That’s not the case at all. We’re so close. But we need to make sure that we eliminate these small mistakes, these mental mistakes that have cost us games.”
The Citadel game was tied at 3 when Madison Stokes tripled to lead off Carolina’s half of the eighth inning. After the Gamecocks failed to bring Stokes home, the Bulldogs’ Ben Peden led off the ninth with the go-ahead home run.
Kingston sensed his players were a “little pissed off” afterward. He viewed that as a positive.
“When you lose a game like that,” Kingston said, “you should be a little bit upset.”
LT Tolbert, one of 16 juniors or seniors on the roster, had his six-game hitting streak snapped Tuesday.
“Obviously, we’re frustrated because we keep dropping these games we should never lose,” Tolbert said. “That’s frustrating, but I also think, at the same time, we still are confident and we know we’re a good team.
“We went toe-to-toe with Florida this weekend and they’re one of the best teams in the country. We know we’re a good team, but we got to do a better job of winning those games, especially during the mid-week.”
South Carolina went 1-4 in road SEC series last season. Freshman John Gilreath, filling in for injured ace Adam Hill, gets the ball in game one.
The Bulldogs are 10-1 at home this season.
“You can go two ways,” Kingston said. “When you struggle, it can make you weaker or make you stronger. My job as the leader of this program is to make sure that our struggles, we learn from them, we understand why we’re struggling and what needs to be adjusted.”
This story was originally published March 22, 2018 at 12:58 PM with the headline "'Believe it's gonna happen.' Gamecocks fight recent history to find baseball success."