RALEIGH, N.C. — The long, storied history of South Carolina baseball includes just about everything. Omaha trips. National Championships, plural. Legendary moments, walk-off wins, just about everything in between.
But the book on this one is empty.
South Carolina baseball will have to win three games in two days in someone else’s ballpark to keep the season alive after dropping the key game of the Raleigh Regional 6-4 to North Carolina State on Saturday night. It is the predicament every team who loses on Friday or Saturday faces, and one very few escape. Since the NCAA went to this format in 1999, 310 out of 384 teams to start a regional 2-0 have ended up winning it.
The Gamecocks have actually escaped a loser’s bracket situation twice — 2001 and 2016 — but both at home. Never on the road, never as the lower seeded team, and certainly not in circumstances quite like this.
“We played five games in five days last week,” Mark Kingston said. “So it’s not impossible as I told the guys. It’s going to be tougher now, it’s going to be a longer road, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”
Adding to the Mount Everest the Gamecocks will have to climb, one of their best metaphorical pickaxes might be down for the count. Slugger Ethan Petry took a pitch to the hand in Friday’s win over James Madison and did not play on Saturday night, a topsy-turvy situation which came all the way down to the final 20 minutes before game time before the Gamecocks finally ruled him out and slotted Dylan Brewer into the lineup for the first time in over five weeks.
Certainly it feels like the offense is going to have to carry the load in at least one of these upcoming three games to alleviate a pitching staff which will be taxed to the maximum. But can this injury heal in one extra day?
“It was not possible he could play tonight,” Kingston said. “He’s got a hairline fracture right above his pinky, and he was just not able to feel like he could swing the bat and hold the bat at a level that would allow him to hit. Obviously, we’ll wake up in the morning and re-evaluate.”
If Petry is out, the offense will probably stay the same. Brewer actually popped two home runs, matching his total from all of SEC play. But as always with teams in the dreaded corner of the loser’s bracket, pitching becomes the concern.
Three games is, at least, 27 innings and 81 outs. The Gamecocks are essentially in the situation of needing to sweep a regular-length conference series, with a doubleheader mixed in, and after already using Eli Jones, Chris Veach and Garrett Gainey for extended outings in the last two days.
Gainey, who threw 87 pitches and got through six innings with four earned runs allowed to at least give his offense a chance to pull it back again, is ready to go again.
“This is my last year,” Gainey said. “My last go at it. I’m going to give the team everything I’ve got in order for us to win.”
Kingston hinted at Dylan Eskew as his starter for tomorrow afternoon’s game against James Madison, at least one seasoned starter still in the bank who could deliver the Gamecocks a lifeline. But at this point, any path out of Raleigh involves somebody stepping up. Something heroic, something unprecedented, someone channeling the deepest ghosts of Michael Roth, Matt Price and everyone else who has ever stretched themselves in the postseason in a South Carolina uniform.
But not even those great Gamecocks, the ones who altered the program forever, ever had to do this.
Parker Marlatt has not pitched yet after his career-best outing in Hoover. Roman Kimball took the mound for the first time in over two weeks and got through the first 11 outs scoreless before his defense let him down. True freshman Jake McCoy lurks, along with depth arms Michael Polk and Tyler Dean.
Is this enough to seriously do the unthinkable? Does that bullpen have enough pitchers with enough gas in the tank to beat James Madison tomorrow afternoon, turn around and beat the regional hosts and No. 10 national seed NC State tomorrow night, then do it all over again with all the chips down on Monday?
There is no other way out. There is exactly one path, one option left standing between the Gamecocks and a season they themselves would describe as an underachievement.
Backs to the wall, and the only way out is through.
"I feel like we're going to be all hands on deck,” Gainey said. “And we're going to get it done. We're going to believe in that, and y'all should, too."
They still have the belief. Now it is time to see what else they have left.
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