Hoover, Alabama, the site of the SEC Baseball Tournament, hasn't been kind to the Gamecocks in recent years.Coach Chad Holbrook hasn't won a game in the tournament in his coaching career, losing seven games straight in Hoover since 2012.
The trend continued Wednesday, when the SEC East champions fell behind early in a 10-4 loss to Ole Miss. The Gamecocks committed five errors that resulted in four unearned runs for the Rebels, but the offense struggled as well. South Carolina struggled to come up with the timely hit, failing to score Gene Cone from second with one out in the first and leaving the bases loaded in the sixth.
All-SEC second-teamer Clarke Schmidt got the start on the hill for the Gamecocks, and after he struck out the first two batters he faced, fans had reason to believe he was on his way to another dominant performance, like when he held Ole Miss to one run in 6.2 innings in a win back in March. That feeling wouldn't last for long, as back-to-back hits coupled with an errant throw to the plate from Marcus Mooney that sailed into the Rebel dugout gave the seven seed a 2-0 lead.
Schmidt appeared to have settled down after the first inning, retiring five of the next six batters he faced, but with two outs in the third, Ole Miss broke the game wide open. The Gamecock ace issued a two-out walk to put runners on first and second before surrendering a single up the middle, scoring the runner from second. Dom-Thompson Williams misplayed the ball in center, allowing J.B. Woodman to score and Henri Lartigue to reach second from the box. The next batter bounced a hard grounder to Jonah Bride at third, which would've ended the inning if it hadn't skipped off Bride's glove into left field, putting South Carolina down 5-0.
The Gamecocks got some life back in the bottom half of the third when Alex Destino drove in a pair with a two-out double off the wall, but the momentum was short-lived. In the fifth, Schmidt allowed three straight hits, the final of which was a two-RBI double that ended his afternoon.
South Carolina bounced back again with two runs in the seventh, but again the Rebels would answer. After Bride committed his second error of the game, and only his third of the season,and reliever Reed Scott surrendered a single, Taylor Widener was brought in to keep the deficit at three. Widener walked the first batter he faced and then gave up a three-run moonshot to Lartigue, bringing the game to its final margin of 10-4.
The Gamecocks will have a shot at redemption Thursday morning when they take on Texas A&M at 10:30 EST. Braden Webb is expected to take the hill against the Aggies, who took two out of three from South Carolina just two weeks ago.