Tournament win 'felt like us' for the Gamecocks
The Gamecocks had waited, painstakingly, for a month to have a day like it did Tuesday morning.
Mark Kingston mentioned over the course of this frustrating skid for South Carolina that all three phases haven’t lined up at the same time. They did Tuesday en route to South Carolina’s first win in Hoover since 2018 and the program’s first shutout in SEC Tournament history.
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“Clearly I think this was our best all-around game: no errors, 12 hits, nine runs, no earned runs given up. We had more walks than strikeouts offensively,” Kingston said. “That is what it felt like for 40 games for us, truthfully.”
It started and ended with James Hicks, who was electric in his first start against SEC competition.
He motored through 6.2 scoreless innings, scattering four hits and a pair of walks while getting Georgia to pound that sinker into the ground time and time again.
Cade Austin–who had struggled in SEC play–came in and gave up a pair of baserunners and struck out three over 2.1 innings.
A South Carolina team that allowed far too many extra-base hits over this month stretch gave up just five total hits, one that was better than a single.
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“Today’s game is about what the first 40 or so games felt where we just knew that our offense would be there, our defense would be there, we would pitch at a high level,” Kingston said. “Then we hit some adversity. Today felt like us. It felt like how we played baseball for the great majority of the season.”
Offensively the Gamecocks had double-digit hits for the first time against an SEC game since the third game against Auburn.
South Carolina walked five times, struck out just twice and found ways to get big hits with men on base in the process.
Will Tippett continued to showcase his upward trajectory with a bases-loaded triple in the seventh inning to bust the game open.
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“I feel like I’m always confident within myself because if you’re not, good things won’t happen. I’ve been sticking to my approach, what King and Monte have been telling me,” Tippett said. “And I get the opportunity, I take what’s given to me. And it worked out today, and hopefully, we keep going.”
It would have been easy for the Gamecocks to head into the tournament dejected, go one-and-done and limp back to Columbia to get healthy.
But they didn’t, and now South Carolina gets a chance to play LSU and continue to bolster a potential hosting resume.
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“I think sometimes we confuse poor performance with poor attitude or poor effort, which is not the case ever with this team. This team always provides a great effort with energy, and sometimes we just don’t play well enough. But you can never confuse performance with effort and attitude with this team. They always come out with energy,” Kingston said.
“It was great to see it this morning because there’s just a small part of you that says how are we going to be with the rut that we’re in with a 9:30 game and it’s raining out and batting practice is in the cages and we can barely take ground balls. You just don’t know for sure. I was hoping we would come out and play well, and we did. We did.”
