Everything Mark Kingston said after South Carolina gets swept by Tennessee
Following South Carolina’s 4-1 loss to Tennessee on Saturday, head coach Mark Kingston spoke to the media about the game. Here’s what he had to say.
On why he started Dylan Eskew on the mound
“Eskew pitches the best when he starts. He’s just more comfortable there. That’s the thing, a lot of our guys, for whatever reason, some are more comfortable starting, some are more comfortable coming out of the bullpen. So that’s how we made those decisions. And I thought they all looked pretty good today.”
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On the message to the team after today’s game
“The regular season’s over. The new season starts. We’ve shown on most days we can go toe-to-toe with anybody. But we’ve got to get over that hump, I know I’ve said that a lot. But that was a game in the postseason with two good teams going at it and we fell just short. These guys like playing together and they’re not going to back down.”
On if he’s confident this team has an NCAA Tournament resume
“Yeah. The precedent is if you get to 13 and you have an RPI better than 30, you always make it. So I’ll stick with the precedent.”
On if it’s easy to turn the page after another sweep
“Well, we’ve got to go home, rest for a day, and head to Hoover and get ready to play again.”
On if he wanted all his older pitchers throwing on the last day of the series
“It wasn’t that we wanted all the old guys throwing on the last day, we just wanted to find spots where they could be successful. I thought we saw that today. And now we’ve got to figure out how translates into Hoover and then the NCAA Tournament.”
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On Eli Jones’ relief outing
“I thought Eli was better. Again, we didn’t get credit for any errors there, but it sure looked like Eli had some tough luck. But I thought his stuff was better, still has to make some adjustments against lefties. But against righties, he was really good.”
On if it was by design to not have any of today’s pitchers go more than one time through the lineup
“Yeah, we wanted to match it up and not overexpose anybody. Again, a lot of them seemed to feel good in that kind of role. So we’ll continue to see if we can do that.”
On if he played today’s game with playing in Hoover on Tuesday in mind
“No, no. I mean, we wanted to monitor pitch counts so guys would be available for Tuesday.”
