Everything Paul Mainieri said after South Carolina's 17-0 loss on Friday

Following a 17-0 run-rule loss to Texas A&M on Friday, South Carolina head coach Paul Mainieri spoke one-on-one with GamecockCentral. Here’s everything he had to say.

Just your overall thoughts on the game…

“Was there a game here tonight? I don’t know. I don’t think we really showed up for it. I don’t use the word embarrassed very frequently. Tonight was embarrassing for us and for our school. I just can’t really put into words what happened tonight. Well, I guess I can. 11 walks and hit batters, four hits. They just completely dominated us. It’s tough to take to be honest with you. Been on this side of too many of these in my life, but it’s not quite much fun tonight, that’s for sure.”

You said it didn’t feel like you guys showed up. Do you question the effort at all tonight?

“It’s just when your pitching is so poor at the beginning of the game. And to be honest with you, our catching was poor as well. We were all over the place. We had balls going to the backstop, and we just got in a big hole right away. We actually hit a lot of balls hard, just right at people. It doesn’t show on the scoreboard, we didn’t score any runs, and we only had four hits. We actually had several balls that we hit very hard. Their center fielder ran down a couple, and their shortstop made an unbelievable play on a smash that Evan Stone hit.

“It’s never as good as it looks, and it’s never as bad as it looks. It was just that we pitched so poorly tonight, and it just kind of took the wind out of our sails very early. But then we had a pop-up with the bases loaded that the left fielder clearly should have called the shortstop off of. And those are fundamental mistakes that I take the blame for. We work hard every day on pop fly communication. All year, we’ve been doing a great job on that. But tonight, we didn’t, and we should have gotten out of the inning. Instead, they scored a bunch of runs that inning. I don’t know what else to say. It was just a very, very, very poor game for us tonight.”

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If you can, is there anything you can put your finger on as to why the first inning seems to be an issue, just for the pitching staff in general lately?

“Yeah, they’ve got to throw the ball over the plate. You don’t throw the ball over the plate, there’s no defense against the base on balls. I don’t know what to say. It was just very poor on our part.”

Dylan Eskew is off the injury report…

“Yeah, he’s pitching tomorrow.”

Is Eskew going to start tomorrow?

“Yeah. He’ll be limited.”

Do you have a pitch count in mind yet for Eskew?

“We’re not really sure yet.”

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