South Carolina's season ends with loss in SEC Tournament

Murphy’s Law has largely defined South Carolina’s season, where everything that could go wrong typically did. Tuesday’s season-finale was no different.

The Gamecocks lost a 2-1 game in the SEC Tournament to Florida with the Gators taking advantage of a few fortuitous bounces in extra innings to end South Carolina’s season.

With one out in the inning, reliever Cade Austin got a ground ball to third base that careened off the bag and into left field for a double.

Two batters later, the Gators were walking off the Gamecocks after a play at the plate.

“It’s one of those years where everything that can go wrong goes wrong. In a tight ball game sometimes one bounce can be one team’s great fortune and another team’s misfortune. You’re on the line like you’re supposed to be on the line,” Mark Kingston said.

“Sometimes you just have to say it wasn’t meant to be.”

Austin gave up a single after that and then a walk-off sacrifice fly to centerfield.

Evan Stone’s throw beat Ty Evans to the plate but Talmadge LeCroy, catching because Colin Burgess was pinch ran for, couldn’t hold onto the ball.

“In the end, it was a bang-bang play at the plate. The ball clearly beat the runner but we just dropped the ball. Sometimes that happens,” Kingston said. “That’s a great summary of life. Sometimes you just drop the ball.”

It ends what was a largely disappointing season for the Gamecocks, who finished with a losing record for the first time since 1996.

And it looked like a similar story for South Carolina (27-28), which wasted what were two fantastic pitching performances from Will Sanders and Austin.

Sanders sliced his way through seven innings. He scattered four hits and gave up a lone unearned run on a Michael Braswell scoring error. He struck out 10 to just three walks in what was his final outing of the season.

Austin tossed two perfect innings to send things to extras before hitting trouble in the ninth.

“It’s one ground ball that takes a weird bounce off a bag. It’s the epitome of our season,” Sanders said. “To come up short is sad and really heartbreaking. We’ve been through so much adversity and so much struggle and injury. We try to find ways to win games. It’s hard…We were on the wrong side of a weird circle ball.”

Offensively the Gamecocks were anemic through the first eight innings, going hitless until the seventh inning.

They’d find a way to scrape across a run, using two singles from Josiah Sightler and Braylen Wimmer before an Andrew Eyster RBI fielder’s choice.

But South Carolina couldn’t muster enough late to pull out a season-continuing win.

It wasn’t pretty. Wimmer started with a hard-hit ball up the middle and Sightler had that jam shot through that hole,” Eyster said. “I’m just like, ‘Get something on the ground and run like hell.’ We were able to get it done. But unfortunately, we weren’t able to put another one together.”

It represents a season-long struggle for an offense that couldn’t get off the ground consistently enough. South Carolina’s ranked at or near the bottom in the SEC offensively in three of the last four seasons.

It also ends what’s been an ugly season for the Gamecocks, who will miss the tournament for the fourth time in seven seasons.

The biggest question becomes if Mark Kingston is back for his fifth full season in Columbia.

Over his four full seasons as the Gamecocks’ head coach, South Carolina has been to two tournaments with one Super Regional appearance.

The other two years—outside of a 12-4 COVID year—were two of the worst record-wise in program history. The Gamecocks finished .500 in 2019 and also below that this season.

“Some years everything goes right and you stay healthy and all the prospects turn into production guys and everything goes right. Some years whatever can go wrong goes wrong,” Kingston said.

“We fought until the very bitter end. That’s what I’m going to remember about this group. They fought to the bitter end. They knew the disappointment around this program in the win-loss record. Also within the context of why it’s happened they could give in but they did not.”