SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS BASEBALL

South Carolina starts its baseball season Friday, which means for 15 pitchers it’s the time of year they look most forward to and for three guys, it’ll mean just watching.

The Gamecocks have three players that will miss the year after having Tommy John surgery over the offseason—Graham Lawson, Logan Chapman and Julian Bosnic—all of whom are at different points in their rehab with Lawson being the furthest along.

“He looks awesome. If you watch him throw now, he looks better than he could look last year throwing the ball and he was amazing the last two months of the year. You could see freedom in his arm. I wasn’t here when Graham initially hurt himself,” Skylar Meade said. “But you can tell he was battling through something and thankfully he helped us almost get to Omaha. The arm looks free and it looks healthy.”

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Lawson initially hurt himself before last season but fought through it to pitch well for the Gamecocks last season as a key back-of-the-bullpen arm down the stretch.

It was after he was drafted where he opted to have surgery and return to school for this season and redshirt. He had surgery over the summer and is now up to tossing from 120 feet.

The now senior was expected to be a big part of the bullpen along with Chapman, who was penciled in as a weekend starter after a solid freshman season (3-3, 5.85 ERA).

He tore his UCL in his first outing of the fall and had surgery in early October and has started doing some workouts on the arm before beginning to throw relatively soon.

“Logan has started to do some mobility stuff with the ball. He starts tossing here pretty soon and Julian will be a little staggered because he was a little after,” Meade said. “He’ll start tossing in about March.”

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Bosnic, a freshman lefty, came to school with a little bit of a nagging arm injury and he and the coaches opted to go ahead and have the surgery before his career really started.

Now he and Chapman, who are both early in their time at South Carolina, can focus on getting stronger in the weight room without pitching this year.

“Logan’s kind of skinny and Julian has a frame similar to Adam Hill, so you want to put some mass and strength in his legs because it’s really going to benefit him,” Meade said. “They’re all in a good place.”

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For pitchers, having to sit out a year because of an injury can be tough and cause a player to struggle mentally being around the program but not able to play.

Meade, who battled his own injuries over his career, is trying to avoid that by keeping those three pitchers engaged during scrimmages and practices by talking to them about what’s going on on-field.

He compliments the culture around the program helping keep these guys positive daily and said, even though it’s tough to sit out, rehabbing could have its benefits down the road.

“I think learning the game can be a very valuable thing,” he said. “It’s a weird dynamic when you’re a player and it hurts. It sucks but you can learn so much and become so much of a better player by just taking in what’s going on. And I think those guys have really bought into it.”