South Carolina hits five home runs in midweek blowout win. Next up: Clemson
One week ago, South Carolina played baseball in a winter hellscape. Just 37 people sat in the Founders Park seats on a 36-degree rainy day where frigid air whipped onto bare skin like shards of glass.
At one point in that Feb. 19 win over Queens, slugger Ethan Petry — who was basically wearing a ski mask — mashed a ball 113 mph ... and it didn’t even make it to the warning track. The Gamecocks might as well have been trying to hit bowling balls.
Six days later, on a 69-degree evening that made Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction laughable, South Carolina rolled to a 14-4 seven-inning, run-rule victory over Gardner-Webb and proved for the millionth time that, yes, baseballs travel much further in warmer weather.
“Finally we had some hitting weather,” USC coach Paul Mainieri said. “We took advantage of it today.”
Coming into Tuesday, South Carolina (9-0) had slugged seven home runs in eight games. Against the Runnin’ Bulldogs, the Gamecocks hit five long balls — and those all came in the first four innings.
The dinger party — which resulted in home runs traveling a combined 1,907 feet — began with designated hitter Jase Woita, who blasted a home run in the first inning, hit one even further in the second and had a chance to hit another in the third but struck out. Woita now leads South Carolina with three homers on the season.
“Just being a dawg in the box,” Woita said. “That’s all I was trying to do.”
Catcher Max Kaufer — a Texas A&M transfer making his first start — belted his first long ball as a Gamecock in the second inning. Not long after, freshman KJ Scobey hit home run No. 1 of his college career. Then, in the fourth inning, USC’s Nathan Hall destroyed a three-run bomb that went 401 feet into the left-field concourse.
Perhaps it was apropos that Hall — the Clemson transfer — was the one to put an exclamation point on the final game before the Gamecocks and Tigers play this weekend. For any belief that South Carolina might be looking ahead to the Palmetto Series, the 14 runs scored by the Gamecocks were the most in a pre-Clemson midweek game since 2011.
The series against the Tigers (7-1) — which rolled to a 20-7 win over Winthrop on Tuesday —will begin Friday night at Clemson then continue Saturday in Greenville and wrap up Sunday at 5 p.m. inside Founders Park.
All afternoon, Mainieri worried the hype and excitement of the Clemson series looming was going to doom his players against Gardner-Webb. The pregame infield work was so poor that Mainieri had an impromptu team meeting with the position players before the game and challenged them.
On the second play of the game, right fielder Dalton Mashore did an all-out Superman dive for a foul pop-up. Not only did he not catch it, but he scraped and scuffed his face so bad that “he looks like he just went 10 rounds with (Mike) Tyson).
“I’m sure he was remembering my challenge there,” Mainieri said of Mashore’s dive. “He went all out.”
And with Tuesday’s win, South Carolina can finally look ahead toward Clemson, toward a rivalry that Mainieri is still getting adjusted to.
“All anyone in this town talks about is playing Clemson,” Mainieri said Tuesday. “I’ve never seen anything like it. ... I’m starting to think fans care more about how we do against Clemson than how we do in the SEC.”
They just might. Welcome to South Carolina.
Upcoming South Carolina baseball schedule
- Friday: at Clemson, 7 p.m. (ACC Network Extra)
- Saturday: vs. Clemson at Greenville, 1:30 p.m. (SEC Network Plus)
- Sunday: vs. Clemson, 5 p.m. (SEC Network Plus)
- March 4 vs. Davidson, 6:30 p.m. (SEC Network Plus)
- March 5 at The Citadel, 7 p.m. (ESPN+)
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 9:28 PM.
