Since the season ended, and in between recruiting trips, Mark Kingston has been able to watch a little more college baseball and paid attention to the eight teams currently getting situated in Omaha for the College World Series.
He was able to see what made each of the teams at the pinnacle of college baseball tick, and now it’s Kingston striving to get the Gamecocks to the place offensively where they’re knocking on the door, almost a decade removed from the last trip.
“If you look at teams who are in Omaha right now you’re seeing offenses that have a pretty good level of athleticism, they can score in more than one way,” he said. “Power is a great thing but power can’t be the only thing. You have to have a lot of guys in that lineup that give you good, tough, grind-it-out at-bats.”
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Statistically, the Gamecocks put together one of the best pitching staffs in the SEC and by proxy the country, but the offense struggled for the majority of the season.
Things came to a head with hitters putting up three runs on 10 hits the final two games of the regional, both one-run losses.
It was an offense marred by empty plate appearances, striking out once every 3.5 at-bats with a 2.4 strikeout to walk ratio, as South Carolina ended the year slashing .246/.344/.429.
“The big thing with me, if you’re going to strike out like you are in games, what needed to come along for us was a little bit higher on base percentage. We have to walk that fine line of being aggressive, but are we swinging too much. That’s something we bounced back and forth with throughout the year,” Kingston said.
“We didn’t want to fall behind in the count but sometimes when you’re over aggressive you put balls in play and your on base percentage goes down because you’re maybe swinging at balls that aren’t hitters’ pitches. That’s something we’ll continue to evaluate.”
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Now comes the part of the year where the Gamecock coaching staff will need to formulate a plan to improve an offense that looked anemic at times, then put that new plan into action once the full team returns to campus for fall scrimmages.
Kingston didn’t go into specifics, saying the staff will take “all summer to put things together” to understand what needs to stay in the plan and what needs to be tweaked.
“I’ve already met with Stuart Lake, our hitting coach, and we talked through things: what did we do, what adjustments could have been made? There’s not one secret pill you take where all of the sudden everyone’s a .380 hitter with a .450 on base percentage,” he said.
“It’s everything: it’s how you practice, how you look at video. We’ll continue to evaluate everything we do. He’s been doing it a long time, I’ve been doing it a long time but you need to understand as we move forward there are adjustments that need to be made. Hitters need to make adjustments, coaches always need to make adjustments and we’ll continue to look at and tweak things that need to be tweaked in all those areas.”
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In the end, Kingston wants an offense full of players who are able to work counts and square up the ball, mirrored by some of the offenses playing this weekend in Omaha.
The Gamecocks do have a long way to go statistically with the eight College World Series teams combining to hit .280/.383/.468 and averaging 7.1 runs per game compared to South Carolina’s .246/.344/.429 and 5.6 runs per game.
“At the end of the day what you need are as many good line drive hitters who can give you good at-bats as you can find,” Kingston said. “Then you teach them how to drive the ball better, which turns into home runs and doubles by getting them stronger in the weight room. In an ideal situation that’s how you’re building it.”
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