The South Carolina baseball team seemed to carry its struggles from the weekend over to Tuesday night’s matchup with Charleston Southern, as the Gamecocks fell 4-1 and picked up their first non-conference loss of the season.
“We got our tails kicked by a team that out-competed us, out-scrapped us, out-hustled us,” head coach Chad Holbrook said. “That’s the bottom line.”
The Buccaneers (19-20, 4-11 Big South) got on the board early with a run in the first inning and two scores in the third. Their bats gave the South Carolina pitching staff all it could handle in the contest, collecting 12 hits off of three Gamecock pitchers. South Carolina was only able to amass six hits on the day after being no-hit through 4 2/3 innings.
After receiving the start Tuesday, junior Evan Beal turned in his first poor outing of the season after a stellar three-prior starts. The righty allowed five hits and three earned runs in just 2 1/3 innings of work.
“It’s amazing. This game can turn around,” Holbrook said. “Your game, your year, your season — it can turn around like that.”
Before Tuesday, Beal had allowed just five hits and two earned runs in his limited action this season after starting the year sidelined with a back injury.
After Beal’s day was done, freshman Reed Scott turned in four relief innings in which he allowed four hits and one run. Fellow freshman Josh Reagan closed out the game by pitching 2 2/3 scoreless innings.
The only offensive bright spot for South Carolina (28-8, 8-7 SEC) was the bat of junior Elliott Caldwell, who went 2-4 at the plate on the day. Four other Gamecocks managed a hit in the contest, but Caldwell was the only player to turn in a multiple-hit day.
Junior catcher and team leader Grayson Greiner was held hitless on the day, uncharacteristic of a player with a .322 batting average. He said much of that owes to Buccaneer pitcher Denis Buckley, who pitched 6 2/3 relief innings and only allowed one run while striking out six Gamecock batters.
“He was using both sides of the plate, using his fastball and his slider, and we had a terrible approach,” Greiner said. “We just had a bad approach the whole night, and that’s what happened. That’s why we had one run.”
Greiner is one of the few familiar faces in the South Carolina lineup who wasn’t sitting on the bench Tuesday night, as the injury bug hasn’t been kind to the Gamecocks recently.
Regular starters Joey Pankake, Connor Bright, Max Schrock and Marcus Mooney were all absent from the lineup card Tuesday, but Holbrook said the team can’t use that fact as a crutch while they try to stop a three-game losing skid.
“There’s no excuse. I mean, we’ve got players capable of winning and capable of competing, regardless of who we put out there,” he said. “We’ve got some good players in our dugout that need to play better.”
Holbrook said he will keep a similar starting lineup in Wednesday’s trip to The Citadel, and the injured players that sat out Tuesday’s game will remained sidelined.
Schrock, who’s been fighting an illness that’s lasted almost a week now, was initially in the starting lineup for the game against Charleston Southern and took pre-game batting practice before deciding he wouldn’t be able to go after all.
South Carolina spent the weekend taking a gut-wrenching series loss at home to Florida for the SEC East lead, and many Gamecock fans thought the team’s conference woes wouldn’t affect its non-conference schedule.
But the team that fell to the Buccaneers Tuesday night looked just as lost as the one that has dropped two-straight SEC series, and Wednesday night in Charleston will serve as one more shot to earn a win before vaulting back into conference play this weekend.
“At some point, we were bound to lose a non-conference game. I thought it would’ve been a lot sooner than this,” Holbrook said. “But we have a lot of games and a lot of opportunity in front of us. I’m not going to sit here and say this is a rut.”