RALEIGH, N.C. — Dejected, defeated and dispatched for the 25th and final time in the 2024 season, Mark Kingston sat at the podium following South Carolina baseball’s season-ending 2-0 loss to James Madison.
It was as feeble a way for a team’s season to end as possible, getting shutout by an opponent which had not thrown one in over two calendar years and not leading for a single one of the 853 pitches they were involved in during their three-day Raleigh stay. Out of six completed seasons in Kingston’s tenure, it was the fourth time the team has failed to even play in a regional final.
“I don’t think any time you make the NCAA Tournament out of the SEC you can call it a failure,” Kingston said. “But still, we want to get better. Obviously, we still want to be getting further in the postseason than we did. But I don’t think you can call it a failure."
This particular bout with inconsistency was a team with all the talent and potential you could want, but an ultimately squandered season thanks to fundamental mistakes, mental lapses and a never-ending line of miscues.
In the regional alone South Carolina committed five errors, following on from a dozen in the SEC Tournament. It had three base runners picked off. Walks, a bugaboo all year, punched up at the worst possible time when a bases loaded free pass plated NC State’s winning run in the winner’s bracket game. And of course, the dreaded battle against hitting with runners in scoring position. South Carolina ended the weekend 0-for-20 in such situations, just 5-for-38 with runners on base period.
“It was a quality lefty that matched up well with us today and he got us,” Kingston said of James Madison relief ace Donovan Burke. “I tip my cap to him.”
These details are all, in the larger scheme, deck chairs on the Titanic. A regional-loss in any capacity this season would have been both a tangible step backwards from last year and deemed unacceptable by most in the building who talked about Omaha all fall and pre-season.
A 2-0 loss to James Madison, a loss to NC State tonight by any score, it all leads to the same conclusion.
The 2024 South Carolina baseball season was, indisputably, an underachievement.
“Only 64 teams made it,” Kingston said. “We want to be one of the last eight, clearly. That is very disappointing.”
Forget about the final eight, they could not even reach the final 32. The program has only done so twice under Kingston, a tenure with records that now stand at 217-155 overall, 83-96 in SEC play and 9-8 in the NCAA Tournament.
These felt like the final notes of an underwhelming era, and almost surely will be if the standard in Columbia remains what it has been for decades.
And of course, Kingston fielded the inevitable question about if he still felt he had support from the administration moving forward.
“I think everyone at South Carolina wants to win at a high level,” he said in a one-sentence answer.
They tried it every which way. There were legitimate highs along with the lows. He made it to the doorstep of the College World Series twice. They shuffled assistant coaches, both pitching and hitting in the last two years.
But with a sample size over 350 games now, no top-four SEC finishes and no trips to Omaha at a program which certainly fancies itself a blue blood, it feels almost impossible to believe the notion of winning at a high level and Kingston’s future job status could remain tethered.
That sample size feels complete.
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