Hot bats propel Gamecocks to series win over Clemson in Founders Park finale
Garnet-clad fans, many of them standing, occupied every crevice of Founders Park on Sunday — with a smattering of Clemson orange in between. Backed-up cars inched at a glacial pace into the stadium parking lots, well after the first pitch had already been thrown, itching for a glimpse of the action.
It’s that time of year.
College baseball season doesn’t truly begin in the state of South Carolina until the Gamecocks and Tigers square off. And after the teams split the first two games of the series at Clemson and at Greenville’s Fluor Field, No. 23 South Carolina treated a sellout hometown crowd of 8,242 to an explosive series finale.
Fresh off a late-inning power surge that led them to victory in Saturday’s Game 2, the Gamecocks (11-1) mashed three more home runs against Clemson (5-6) en route to a 7-1 series-clinching win on Sunday.
“It’s big for our fans,” head coach Mark Kingston said. “I’m glad our fans are able to celebrate this. They’ve had a chance to celebrate a lot of success recently athletically, so I’m happy that we can be another part of that.
Junior first baseman Gavin Casas, a muscular 6-foot-4 left-handed slugger, hit his team-leading sixth and seventh home runs of the season to fuel the USC victory. Casas homered on the first pitch of the second inning to break a 1-1 tie, and he added a two-run shot in his next at-bat in the fourth inning.
One batter later, sophomore third baseman Talmadge LeCroy went yard to left field for his first homer of the season, breaking the game open.
That fourth-inning outburst was more than enough for USC’s pitching staff, which rode starter Jack Mahoney and reliever James Hicks.
The junior right-hander Mahoney didn’t have his sharpest stuff, throwing a laborious 83 pitches in his four innings, but he allowed just one run on four hits, struck out four and was able to pitch his way out of multiple jams with a fastball that touched 96 miles per hour.
Hicks relieved Mahoney in the fifth and pitched on cruise control through the end of the game, allowing just two hits and no runs in five innings. Hicks opened last season in the weekend rotation before Tommy John surgery ended his season, and he provided important length out of the bullpen Sunday, touching 92 mph and racking up six strikeouts. When he struck out the side in the eighth, the reserved Hicks even let out a rare scream.
I think that’s the first time in my whole career in baseball that I’ve yelled or screamed coming off the mound,” Hicks said. “And I think I blacked out for that because I don’t really remember it. It just kind of happened. It was just spur the moment. The emotion was there and then just kind of came out.”
Clemson had won six of the last eight three-game rivalry series against South Carolina, including a sweep in 2022, entering this weekend. After a 5-2 win Friday in Clemson, though, the Tigers’ bullpen struggled mightily in Saturday and Sunday losses.
South Carolina’s series win bolsters an early-season résumé that also includes back-to-back weekend sweeps of UMass Lowell and Penn.
“Friday night was the first little bit of adversity that we had to handle this year,” Kingston said. “And I thought how we dealt with it in the dugout on Friday night after the game was over was perfect. We just said, ‘It was one of those games. Come out ready to go tomorrow.’
“And obviously for the first six innings yesterday, it wasn’t really going our way. But we just kept grinding and we just kept playing the game the best we could. It turned in the seventh inning, and we carried that momentum through today.”
Next four USC baseball games
Tuesday: vs. The Citadel, 7 p.m. (SEC Network Plus)
Wednesday: at USC Upstate, 6:30 p.m., Fluor Field in Greenville (ESPN Plus)
Friday: vs. Bethune-Cookman, 7 p.m. (SEC Network Plus)
Saturday: vs. Bethune-Cookman, 4 p.m. (SEC Network Plus)
This story was originally published March 5, 2023 at 4:03 PM.
