RALEIGH, N.C. — Six games into the postseason, five decided by one run, two on walk-offs and what actual concrete statements can be made about South Carolina baseball?
This team lives on the edge.
The Gamecocks were one strike away from a dismal loss to James Madison in the opening game of the Raleigh Regional, an afternoon where Mark Kingston’s defensively porous team committed four more errors and had two base runners picked off. But Blake Jackson found a way on base when he was hit by a pitch, Cole Messina put on his superman cape again with a game-tying two-run home run, and Will Tippett walked it off with a sacrifice fly.
“At the end of the day it’s about winning the ballgame,” an exhausted Kingston said. “And we’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
South Carolina (37-23) certainly did everything it could to make life difficult Friday. A first inning Talmadge LeCroy error led to the game’s first run, and another one in the sixth opened the door for three more James Madison (34-24) runs. The four errors makes it 16 in six postseason games, saying nothing of Dukes’ reliever Donovan Burke catching two guys napping on first base in consecutive innings for pick-offs. They were dead to rights, very literally as close to losing a game as a baseball team possibly could be with two outs, two strikes and nobody on base in the ninth inning.
And yet? They’re in the winner’s bracket, two wins from escaping the Raleigh Regional and four from the College World Series.
“It’s not always pretty,” Kingston said. “Sometimes it’s really pretty and easy, and sometimes it’s not.”
It is hard to imagine this team getting back to a version of pretty, wins and all. The defensive issues are not going anywhere, at this point much more a feature of this team than a bug. The lineup still has gaping holes and glaring inconsistencies in it. Even on an afternoon where the pitching looked better, the numbers do not lie. James Madison still pounded out seven runs on 12 hits and had two other runners thrown out at home plate.
This could have so easily been a disaster, a game relegating the Gamecocks to the doldrums of the loser’s bracket and all but condemning them to an early off-season with the nearly impossible task of winning four games in three days ahead.
But these are the margins of baseball, the thinnest of all sports where one pitch turns disaster into elation and joy into despair. James Madison pitchers threw 150 pitches on Friday, and only one really felt like it tipped the scales.
“That’s a testament to our team,” Chris Veach said. “Just fighting until the end.”
But the same could be said for the Gamecocks, where one pitch here and there made the difference in two one-run losses in Hoover last week. One error opened the door to a six-run LSU inning in the semifinal. Does this team have an SEC Championship trophy in its case without that?
These are the hypotheticals, and there is no way to know.
But these Gamecocks refuse to make things easy on themselves — and also are unrelenting to when they are backed into a corner.
“I would love to look up and we’ve played cleaner defense and we pitched at a very high level and we’ve scored 15 runs,” Kingston said. “But you know what, if that's not what this team is, that’s not what this team is.
Step right up and ride the ride of 2024 South Carolina baseball. It might lead all the way to Omaha. It could just as easily mean tournament expulsion in 48 hours. Both feel just as possible after Friday’s knife edge result, and equally likely to end on another one-run decision.
For better and worse, this is who they are.
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