Will USC seniors stay or go after coronavirus ruling? It’s complicated, Mark Kingston says
George Callil’s career with South Carolina baseball was supposed to end this summer, followed by the inevitable next step into pro ball.
Now, the Australian shortstop, along with his three fellow seniors on the Gamecocks, have a decision to make. With the COVID-19 pandemic upending the 2020 season and the NCAA voting to allow seniors to regain a year of eligibility, Carolina’s four most veteran players could still choose to turn pro or return for one final season in Columbia.
Complicating that decision is the fact that Major League Baseball is likely to shorten its draft to potentially as few as five rounds from the usual 40. With far fewer opportunities and less money available, another year in college might wind up being the call, coach Mark Kingston said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday.
“I think all four of them are hoping to be able to move on to professional baseball at this point,” Kingston said. “But I also think that they understand with a five-round draft, that may not be in the cards yet, so I think they’re all going to continue to weigh their options. I think all four, there’s a possibility that they could come back, there’s a possibility that some could move on to professional baseball. But they all have interest in coming back to this point, but they want to weigh their options, they just want to make sure they’re making the right decisions moving forward.”
And for Callil in particular, there are more pressing short-term concerns — like the vast majority of his teammates, he returned home after the SEC canceled the season, Kingston said. But because home for him is Australia, he was put into a mandatory quarantine upon landing.
“He landed expecting to go to his parents’ house. And when they got off the plane, they escorted everybody to a 14-day quarantine hotel because they came from the United States,” Kingston said. “And so I talked to him yesterday from his hotel, and he said he’s got two more days before he can finally go home.”
If any of the seniors do return, they won’t count against the roster restrictions college baseball has in place — 35-man roster, 27 scholarship players, 11.7 scholarships to go around. But while Kingston said he’s still holding out hope that the NCAA might grant the sport additional relief from those rules in response to the pandemic, he’s still preparing for an even harder than usual task of roster management in 2021 as more juniors return and high schoolers head to school than expected due to the shortened draft.
No matter how short the draft winds up being, however, Kingston is confident that his ace pitcher from the shortened 2020 season, Carmen Mlodzinski, will be gone. Mlodzinski rocketed up draft boards with an impressive summer in the Cape Cod League and continued to impress through the fall and spring with high-level stuff, and Kingston said he still anticipates the right-hander to be a first-round pick.
In contrast, Kingston said he expects right-hander Brett Kerry, who entered 2020 as a draft-eligible sophomore, to be back on staff in 2021. Kerry began the year in the starting rotation but moved to the bullpen to help bolster the back end, and he recorded 18 strikeouts against three walks in 15 innings, with a 3.60 ERA.
Kingston added that thus far, no players have approached him about entering the transfer portal.
South Carolina baseball seniors
George Callil, shortstop
Bryant Bowen, catcher/infield
Dallas Beaver, catcher/infield
Graham Lawson, right-handed pitcher
