After falling short on Opening Day, the South Carolina baseball team had two strong games to take the weekend series over VMI. The Gamecocks got a 7-2 win on Saturday and 9-0 shutout on Sunday. Head coach Mark Kingston was pleased with how his team rebounded from the 7-6 loss on Friday night.
"After Friday night's tough loss, I thought we did a really good job of bouncing back the last two days," Kingston said after Sunday's win. "Played the kind of baseball we want to play. Ridge was really good today ... And then the bullpen came in, threw strikes and had a really good day."
The Gamecock bats struggled in the later innings on Friday, but they got some life in them for the rest of the weekend. South Carolina outscored VMI 16-2 in the final two games, but still scored six runs in its loss. The Gamecocks also hit six home runs within three games, two of them coming from senior Madison Stokes.
Kingston was overall pleased with the pitching. Junior Adam Hill struggled on Friday night, going just four innings and giving up seven runs on five hits. Freshman John Gilreath pitched great at Hill's relief, throwing four scoreless frames with just three hits.
Sophomore Cody Morris had high velocity on Saturday, but lost a little bit of his command as the innings went on. He only walked two and fanned six batters in the 5.2 innings he pitched, which Kingston was happy with. He was also very happy with juniors Ridge Chapman and Gage Hinson and freshman TJ Shook, who gave up just two hits to VMI in the shutout on Sunday.
As far as hitting, Kingston knows the Gamecocks need to hit better not only with two strikes, which they improved on after Friday's game, but also with runners on base. They left a total of 37 men on base over the weekend. Overall, Kingston can see both the positives and the spots his team needs to improve on.
"I still think we need to work on everything," Kingston said. "I'll call it a good first weekend, I won't call it a great first weekend because we didn't sweep, which we're going to try to go into every weekend hoping that that's the goal. So I thought it was a good, solid week. I thought we learned a lot about our team, I thought our pitching, for the most part, did really well ... Saw things we wanted to see and now we just need to continue to build on it."
A huge positive for the Gamecocks was that their upperclassmen were stepping up to be the leaders they need to be. Catchers Chris Cullen and Hunter Taylor both hit homers during opening weekend and had six hits total. They also played strong defense behind the plate and were able to catch runners stealing, all of which Kingston needed to see out of the both of them.
"We challenged both of them. We didn't pull any punches, that they needed to be better than what they were giving us, Hunter and Chris," Kingston said. "I thought they both answered the bell very well. And I told them we need to be regarded as a team that has two elite catchers and based on how they both played this weekend, I think you can do that."
As the Gamecocks look ahead to the rest of the season, they know that they made a great impression during this first weekend.
"Overall, we played the kind of baseball that we want to be known for," Kingston said. "We made one error in 27 innings, we had more walks than strikeouts offensively, our pitchers challenged hitters. So all-in-all that's the kind of, that's the brand of baseball we want to play, we just want to continue to get better at it."
The Gamecocks will look to continue this momentum on Tuesday as they host North Florida.