Gamecocks 'tried just about everything' to get back on track

SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS BASEBALL

South Carolina lost another series this weekend, dropping a vital rubber match to Texas A&M to drop their sixth-straight series and, like most of the weekends before this one, leave looking for answers on how to get this season on track with time running out.

The Gamecock coaching staff has been trying anything and everything to remedy an inconsistent offense and manage a young pitching staff, and at this point in the year they’re running out of different things to test.

“We’ve tried a lot of different things. We haven’t played every card but we’ll continue to explore what we can do with this roster,” Mark Kingston said. “If there’s other things we think that can spark us we’ll look at it. For the most part, we’ve tried just about everything. It’s just a matter of working to get guys better.”

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Through 40 games, they’re hitting .236/.337/.439 with a team ERA of 4.66 and a .251 batting average against. The Gamecocks are fielding .974 as a team this season and .975 in 18 SEC games.

The struggle, though, has come in conference play with the offense struggling for any consistency through the first six series. They’re hitting .192/.289/.336 while pitchers have a team ERA of 5.43 ERA.

It’s been marginally better over the last seven overall games, six of those in the SEC, with the offense averaging four runs per game while slashing .205/.312/.371 while the pitching staff has a 5.31 ERA and a WHIP of 1.543 over the same stretch.

Kingston said they’ve exhausted almost every option they can—continuing to hit off the famous pitching machines that helped turn last year around, shuffling the lineup and rotation and plenty else—but nothing’s sticking as well and as long as they want.

He said after Saturday’s 14-inning doubleheader split, where the Gamecocks put up six total runs on eight hits, he’ll get with his staff before this week’s games and see if there’s anything other cards up their sleeves with 15 games left.

“There’s not an area I’m happy with in terms of being up to snuff right now,” Kingston said. “Our pitching needs to be better, our defense has improved probably as much as anything over the course of the year, and our offense isn’t what it needs to be. Every area of the game this team needs to be better in.”

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The Gamecocks (23-17, 5-13 SEC) find themselves in an interesting position with just 12 league games left to play, sitting near the bottom of the conference’s standings, just a game up on Kentucky and Alabama entering Sunday.

Part of that is injuries taking their toll—their top two pitchers in Carmen Mlodzinski and Logan Chapman are out for extended periods of time—and some of it is a horde of young players going through growing pains in SEC play this year.

But young or not, players are still expected to produce, and there’s a belief among the players if they change their hitting approach things can change for this team.

“Any one can drive it out of here at any moment but it’s mostly trying to focus on base hits and let the home runs come if they do,” Luke Berryhill said. “Other teams are just slapping the ball around if they don’t get their right pitch. I think we need to do a little more of that and be able to settle for singles sometimes. We just have to have a better approach and it’ll start rolling for us.”

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There are signs of some progress offensively with the Gamecocks succeeding in cutting down on their strikeouts in recent games—only averaging 6.8 over their last seven games—but it’s still not where the Gamecocks want it to be.

It’s not for lack of trying, which is probably the most frustrating part for this year’s team and coaches.

“I’ll say that about the entire team right now,” Kingston said. “They’re giving us everything they have right now. We just have to get better.”