Brandon Stone saw KJ Scobey gobble up the ground ball at third base, and he put his arms in he air. He watched Scobey make a clean throw across the diamond to Beau Hollins, and he let out an enormous sigh of relief along with a karate kick.
South Carolina baseball finally got the series-opening start it has been crying out for all year, thanks to an instant classic from Stone.
Stone fired a complete game on just 86 pitches, allowing two runs on six hits with four strikes and no free passes allowed, outdueling Ole Miss ace Hunter Elliott and guiding the Gamecocks to a 3-2 victory at Founders Park. The win is just South Carolina’s second SEC series-opening win of the season, and will give the Gamecocks two opportunities to get their first conference series win of the season.
“After having a really bad game and getting walked off twice [last weekend] we needed a leader out there tonight,” Paul Mainieri said. “And he was a leader. I knew he would be. He was a tremendous leader, coming out, pounding the strike zone and getting us off to a good start.”
Stone’s complete game was the nine-inning one for the program since Brett Kerry threw one on May 15, 2021 at Kentucky, and beat the next-longest start from a Gamecock this season by two whole innings.
After shuffling the ace spot in the rotation between Dylan Eskew, Matthew Becker, Stone and Jake McCoy the last two weeks. South Carolina turned back to Stone for the opener against Ole Miss and the JUCO transfer spun a gem.
“I felt pretty good from the beginning,” Stone said. “This week in my bullpen, [pitching] coach [Terry] Rooney really worked on getting the ball down again. I just kept it down, made them get themselves out and kept throwing it.”
Right from the start, Stone had everything working. He was firing strikes, something South Carolina’s (22-17, 3-13 SEC) staff sorely needed after it issued 33 free passes last weekend at Texas A&M. He was inducing soft contact, particularly rollers to his infielders. In the first two innings alone Ole Miss (27-11, 9-7 SEC) hitters tapped two balls in front of the plate that catcher Gavin Braland handled, and weakly tapped two more balls to shortstop Henry Kaczmar.
The one time all night Stone had traffic on the bases, a ground ball saved him. Ole Miss put two runners on with one out in the fourth inning thanks to back-to-back singles — one of them an infield single after a comebacker deflected off Stone and fell into no man’s land — but a weak roller to second base allowed Jordan Carrion to start a 4-6-3 double play and end the threat.
“If I get a baserunner on, the next thing I know I’m talking to Henry and Jordan trying to get them to roll it up for me,” Stone said. “It saves a lot of pitches, and lets me go deeper in the games. It worked out tonight. They were absolutely amazing with that.”
He did allow two solo home runs, a third inning shot by Ole Miss catcher Austin Fawley and a sixth inning blast from left fielder Mitchell Sanford, but quickly got back on the beam both times and ended the inning without any more damage. He induced key double plays in the seventh and ninth innings after lead-off base runners reached.
South Carolina’s offense had its own challenges against Elliott and Ole Miss relief ace Mason Morris, but scratched across just enough offense. Nathan Hall had two critical hits in his first game back from a brief injury absence, both in scoring innings. His lead-off double set the table for the first run when he came around to score on Carrion’s RBI groundout, and his RBI single in the fifth ended up being the game-winning hit as Scobey crossed the plate.
The Gamecocks never added on. Morris struck out six of the eight batters he faced in a dominant relief outing, leaving Stone with zero margin for error. The only question was if he could finish the drill, one Mainieri posed to his starter after the eighth.
“I did go over and ask him after the eighth inning,” Mainieri said.”’Have you ever gone nine innings before?’ And he said yeah, but at a much higher pitch count, 130 pitches or so. He felt so fresh, there was no way I was taking the ball from him.”
It was Stone’s game to win or lose. And on this night, there was never a doubt which way it would go.
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