A record-setting day, for all the wrong reasons.
South Carolina baseball was on the wrong side of two more home losses in SEC play, getting swept by the Gators in a doubleheader to drop to 14 games below .500 in conference play and confirm a seventh series loss out of eight conference weekends and nine out of 10 dating back to last season.
"Not much to say," Paul Mainieri said. "We just got beat by a better team today."
Game two was the type of loss this team has had all year, a relatively drab affair where a more talented team played better and won 8-0. That alone is bad, an ugly defeat with no real silver linins. Game one, on the other hand, was a disaster of epic proportions.
Florida won Sunday’s first game — thes second game of the series, a continuation of Saturday’s rain-suspended action — 22-3, the program’s heaviest margin of defeat in a game since 1997, the first year of the increasingly far-gone Ray Tanner Era.
South Carolina (26-23, 5-19 SEC) hung around for most of the afternoon, albeit never actually taking the lead. KJ Scobey hit his fifth home run of the season and Jordan Carrion drove in a run with an RBI single, but Florida (33-16, 11-13 SEC) did just enough all day to keep the Gamecocks at arm’s length. South Carolina even had the tying run at the plate as late as the seventh inning with two on in a 6-3 game.
But it fell apart in the final two frames, and did so in almost impossible fashion. Florida pounded out 16 runs across two frames, four unearned runs in the eighth after a Carrion error extended the inning with the score at 7-3, then a 40-minute, 11-run top of the ninth inning.
A combination of Zach Russell, Aydin Palmer and Roman Kimball walked seven batters — four with the bases loaded — and 11 earned runs in total, punctuated by a Brendan Lawson grand slam just over the wall in left to take the inning into double-digits.
"They can only do the best they can," Mainieri said. "Every kid has to look himself in the mirror and ask know if he's really doing the best he can. And if they are, that's all they can do."
Those 22 runs were the most allowed in a game by the program since 2019, and also confirmed South Carolina’s 10th loss of the season by at least six runs.
The number stayed at 10 for a matter of hours.
Number 11 followed in the second game of the twinbill. Spot starter Ashton Crowther battled, but was badly let down by his defense. A Henry Kaczmar error on what should have been a tailor-made double play ball in the fourth inning opened the door for two Florida runs, extending what was a manageable 1-0 deficit into a seemingly insurmountable 3-0 hole.
"You can deal with whatever your so called limitations," Mainieri said. "But it's not that hard to field a groundball. Those are things that any player should be able to do. In every aspect of the game, we just didn't play very well today."
Seemingly insurmountable due to the state of South Carolina’s offense. Even against a shaky Florida pitching staff, there was nothing to offer. The Gamecocks had four hits in the series finale and left five on base, bringing the weekend total to a staggering 31.
Hayden Yost’s two-run homer in the sixth took the game out of one-swing territory and confirmed the inevitably, that 2025 would take another step on the road to becoming the worst season in Gamecock baseball history.
An almost completely empty Founders Park watched the final outs fall away and with just two weeks to go, this season is officially at a point where it can’t end soon enough for anyone in garnet and black.
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