South Carolina baseball beats The Citadel 4-0 in home midweek

A decent crowd in Columbia enjoyed spring weather, a low key game and a comfortable South Carolina midweek victory over The Citadel, 4-0 after four runs in the first three innings set the tone.

"There's no use dwelling on the past," Paul Mainieri said. "The worst thing is if you let it drag into the next day or the next game or whatever. We still have a lot to play for, and the guys went out there and played pretty well today, I thought. Obviously, we pitched great."

South Carolina (21-17) improved to 10-1 in midweek games, and snapped its three-game losing streak after a nightmare sweep at Texas A&M last weekend. True freshman KJ Scobey opened the scoring with his fourth home run of the season, an opposite field shot out into the home bullpen in the second inning.

The Gamecocks added two more runs in the inning off the strength of three hits and two free passes. Henry Kaczmar started the rally with a sharp double to left, his second hit in as many innings as the red hot shortstop extended his on-base streak to 20 games. Ethan Petry knocked Kaczmar home with a first-pitch single to left, and eventually came around to score himself when The Citadel (19-18) starter Conner Cummiskey hit Beau Hollins on the leg with the bases loaded to force in a run.

"He got off to a slow start but he's leading our team in hitting in SEC play," Mainieri said about Kaczmar. "He led off at Ohio State during his career there, and we started this season with him hitting in the two-hole here. When he really started to struggle here I wanted to take a lot of pressure off of him so I moved him down in the order. He really flourished in the nine-hole, but he's much better than being a nine-hole hitter.

"When Nathan [Hall] went down it seemed like the natural move to move him to the lead-off spot, and he's done really well there."

Those early tallies were nearly the end of the story for South Carolina offensively, outside of a Gavin Braland RBI single. At one point a collection of Citadel relievers retired 13 consecutive Gamecocks, but its own offense could not get anything going.

Jackson Soucie pitched a solid 3 ⅓ innings with five strikeouts and only one walk, and Tyler Pitzer carried the game into the sixth inning with just two singles allowed. For the night South Carolina’s pitchers allowed seven hits, but all singles as the Bulldogs only moved two runners into scoring position all game. Ashton Crowther took over for Pitzer, and Parker Marlatt completed the night on the mound.

"Right now I'd say my two-seam/sinker is working the most for me," Crowther said. "I have a lot of good feel for it, and tonight it was just dropping off the table."

South Carolina will turn around and return to SEC play in just two days with a Thursday-Saturday series due to Easter weekend. No. 11 Ole Miss comes to Founders Park to start the second half of conference play.

"The kids showed that they're not giving up," Mainieri said. "We came back and played a good game after a difficult weekend. We're going to go out there against Ole Miss and we're going to play as hard as we possibly can, compete as hard as we can."

First pitch for Thursday's opener is set for 6:30 p.m. Thursday.

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