This baseball season is very important for Gamecock athletics. Things started OK
South Carolina could really, really, really use a solid baseball season.
And, for a moment, ignore the history of this program. Forget the two national championships. Dismiss what Bobby Richardson, June Raines and Ray Tanner (the baseball coach) did to elevate this program. Try not to think about how South Carolina was the premier college baseball program in America just 15 years ago.
That was then. This is now — and well, right now the Gamecocks should celebrate even a modicum of the success it’s used to.
Like on Friday, when South Carolina swept Northern Kentucky during an opening day doubleheader, using a solid pitching performance to a game-one win and finishing the night with a walk-off home run from K.J. Scobey.
It was a bright spot for the Gamecocks ... that soured a bit soon after. On Saturday, South Carolina fell 3-2 to the Norse, losing its first game of the season and falling to a mid-major program for the first time under second-year coach Paul Mainieri.
To be fair: While losing February games to unknown directional schools is never ideal, it’s also still February. There are too many games remaining to make judgments about this South Carolina baseball team.
But after 2025, the entire athletic department has to sure be hoping Saturday was a blip because, boy, the Gamecocks need something positive to come from its top three men’s sports.
Think about this: Last year, the South Carolina football (4-8 record), men’s basketball (12-20) and baseball (28-29) teams all had losing records for the first time since 1963. They had the sixth-worst combined winning percentage (40%) since World War II. And all three squads missed the postseason for the first time since 2020 and just the fourth time since 2000.
It was one of the worst years for South Carolina men’s athletics in school history. Tanner, who hired the three head coaches while athletic director, seems confident this is a valley USC will soon emerge from.
“It is cyclical. I believe that,” Tanner said on Saturday. “It happens that way — there’s ups and downs. We were talking about men’s basketball this morning ... just a couple of years ago, Lamont won 26 games. Did he forget how to coach? No. Things happen.”
But so far in 2026, there have been no signs that South Carolina’s fortunes are reversing.
The South Carolina men’s basketball team has a sub-.500 record and almost-assuredly is going to miss the NCAA Tournament for the second straight season, and the future of head coach Lamont Paris — who would be owed a buyout over $12 million if fired — is up in the air.
And if South Carolina athletic director Jeremiah Donati did move on from Paris, it would put even more pressure on the Gamecocks’ baseball team.
Many fans called for the firing of head baseball coach Paul Mainieri after a shaky first season in Columbia in 2026. If the Gamecocks again fail to make the NCAA Tournament — or, worse, go under .500 again — the calls for South Carolina to fire Mainieri (and eat what would be about a $4 million buyout) would continue.
You can see how the Gamecocks could get into a tricky financial situation before fall, when Shane Beamer will begin a make-or-break football season.
The hope for South Carolina is no one is thinking about that come August, that the Gamecocks’ baseball team plays well enough that fans get through all spring and summer without mentioning the word ‘buyout.’ And it’s certainly possible.
As proof, Mainieri likes to mention how his time at LSU started. He took over as the Tigers’ skipper in 2007, and well, his first season at LSU was almost as bad as his first season at South Carolina. The Tigers went 29-26 and missed the NCAA Tournament in Mainieri’s first season. A year later, though, LSU made it to the College World Series. A year after that, in 2009, it won the national championship.
“I wish I could promise you that’s what’s going to happen here,” Mainieri said this week with a laugh.
South Carolina doesn’t need a trip to Omaha in 2026. It just needs a glimmer of hope. Just a solid season that ends in the NCAA Tournament. It needs to get through a major men’s sport season not dominated by talk of the head coach’s future. Is that a low enough bar to clear?
