Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] On this episode of Cox Talking Gamecocks baseball series, recap and discussion on the state of the program and also softball ends their regular season on a high note. Okay, here we go.
[00:00:55] Okay. Welcome to episode 318 of Cox Talking Gamecocks. I am your host, Tim Cox, where I will keep every episode from 1801 to 2001. Hope y'all had a fantastic week out there. Gamecock Nation. I was up celebrating a wedding, talking college sports. Just. Just good stuff. Just good stuff here. May the fourth be with you. Happy Cinco de Mayo. The Kentucky Derby was this weekend. Derby day is great. You know, it's just a. It's a great reason to just talk about a sport that you probably really don't know anything about.
[00:01:39] You know what I mean? Like, I'll look at the morning lines, you know, looking at the post positions and all that jazz. And you'll talk to your friends like, hey, I like journalism. Or, I like this horse. I like that horse. And it's just. You don't know what you're freaking talking about. And even if you do kind of know horse racing, it's still kind of a crapshoot. So it's always a. That's always a fun, official start of spring, summer, right? Like, we've had some fantastic weather here, but when the derby day hits and you are into May, you know that you're in it. And you got the whole spring and the whole summer ahead of you. So, yeah, busy weekend. Nonetheless, hope you all are ready to take on this week here. Don't have a ton to cover with y'all today, but we're going to go through all the comings and goings of the weekend. Going to spend a few minutes unpacking the situation that is our baseball program in the state of affairs over there. But before I get into that, let's get into my Gamecock trivia calendar here. It is, in fact, a piece of trivia for y'all.
[00:02:50] What former South Carolina star earned a Pro bowl nod after racking up 89 receptions for 1,421 yards and seven touchdowns during the 2013 NFL season?
[00:03:04] So if we work backwards from that 2013, having a good season, I'm going to say Alshon. Boom. Alshon Jeffrey is your answer there. Shout out. Alshon had himself a fantastic Gamecock career. Still, he could. He comes around the program with some regularity, to my understanding, obviously having the connection with Beamer, who helped recruit him, but fantastic Gamecock career. Super bowl champion Alshon Jeffrey had a pretty nice NFL Career, all things considered. And just another example of hard work. And at South Carolina, you can make all kinds of things happen. Gamecock and the pros absolutely love it, but. All right, weekend recap for y'all here. Got some scores to go over. Friday softball beat Alabama three to one. Women's tennis beat Kansas four nothing. And men's tennis beat VCU for nothing. Saturday softball beat Alabama seven to two. That won the series. They played on Thursday night, actually took the loss. But you win Friday, win Saturday, so they win the series, and that concludes their regular season. SEC Championship tournament is next. So we talked about that last episode that can you end the regular season on a high note and can you have some momentum on your side as you go into this next stage here in the postseason? And the team absolutely did. And if you haven't, go check out the pictures from this weekend series. The fan support is truly the. The best that I've seen, like, since paying close attention to all these different sports here, like, in covering them a little bit closer, doing the podcast, I don't think I've seen that stadium so packed with the troves of fans, like, maybe last year when the team was really hot, like, and went on that little bit of a run. But this was awesome, and this was really, really cool to see. And we support our student athletes and we love all of our teams. We love Gamecocks, you know, so really, really cool to see. So, yeah, we'll await the whole bracket and results and things like that as it comes out. Well, obviously, I'll talk about that next episode, but the ladies are fully dialed in now for some postseason play. And then also on Saturday, men's tennis beat Florida State 4 to 3. That win actually sends them to the super Regionals. So another team progressing in the postseason. And women's tennis unfortunately lost to UNC for nothing. So it was an eventful weekend from around several sports there. We love seeing postseason action. We love seeing moving along and with a chance to do some really, really exciting things, the sec, that SEC tournament is going to be a lot of fun to track and be a lot of fun to watch. There's some good teams, including ours. But of course, now you have Oklahoma, you have Texas. You know, there's just some good SEC softball programs. So if you can make it far in this tournament and if our team can do that, it would really bode well for them in the next stage, wherever that may be.
[00:06:31] But then sticking to the diamond here, brace yourself. We're talking baseball. Okay, so we're going to go game by game here.
[00:06:40] And then we're just going to share my thoughts on some things here. Like I said, there wasn't too much to go over from these last few days and, and when we're talking about this series here in particular, you don't really want to dive too deep into it. So, you know, I'll go and we'll talk for the next few minutes and you know, that'll be that. And you still got a couple more weeks left in this baseball season to see what this team can do. But yeah, so the Yardcocks had a tough series against Florida in front of the home fans Friday. Carolina lost nine to five. Now the Gamecocks did get the party started right away in this one. They scored three in the first inning, but again those middle innings hurting as Florida scored two in the fourth and five in the fifth. Carolina tried to battle back a little bit there, but just really couldn't mount any sort of a comeback. Brandon Stone got the start and a no decision going four innings. Some player highlights from this one. Boholins two for four with two rbi. Jace Reute three for four with one Ribby.
[00:07:48] Game two. So this, it was a little funky where Saturday's game started but then was postponed due to rain. So it was a like game and 2/3 on Sunday. So game two, South Carolina lost 22 to 3.
[00:08:09] You heard that correctly. And that is not a football score. So Florida was winning throughout this game, but it was an 11 run 9th inning that made this so lopsided. So it wasn't like this was a particularly close game to begin with, but it was an understandable score. Right. It wasn't 22.
[00:08:33] So yeah, it was just could not stop the bleeding in that ninth inning. Pitching change didn't help. You know, you made a pitch change change to two outs and backfired.
[00:08:44] So yeah, Jake McCoy got the start and the loss on that, but there's really just not much more you can say.
[00:08:51] So we're not Game three. South Carolina lost eight. Nothing. And I don't even have anything noteworthy of the box score to talk about that. So let's talk about the state of affairs here in Gamecock baseball.
[00:09:06] Y'all know we've been following along. I've been talking about it week in and week out. Like disappointing season. Right? Well, it started off okay and then you got to sec play and it just went downhill, downhill. And there's been games where the team has looked okay. There's been the occasional maybe like one or two weekends where the team Looked all right.
[00:09:30] This, this is a series that's a backbreaker because South Carolina for the most part did show fight in other series, right? Like, there'd be one game where maybe you lost, like by eight runs or whatever, but the other ones, Carolina would scrape out a win or it'd be a close one where, you know, this was three butt kickings, like Friday's game, nine to five. Like, okay, it was nine to five because we scored three in the first, right? You didn't mount anything really after that.
[00:10:08] 22 to three and eight. Nothing like that. Doesn't like that. To me, when you just look at it on paper, it feels like a team that is just kind of broken and I don't really know what to say.
[00:10:28] It's convenient for a guy that has his own podcast. But like, I don't know where this went so wrong.
[00:10:37] You know, there, yes, we lost some big time pieces from the last year or two, guys who were great pitchers and great hitters.
[00:10:49] So I think anyone would think that no matter who was the coach, the team would take a little bit of a step back, but you still have some good talent.
[00:11:03] Then it is a new coach, Right? And so is it the talent or is the team just not responding to the new coach? Right. So then, so then you can start to think about culture and everything like that.
[00:11:19] Paul Manieri was sort of. Not sort of. He was an outside the box hire. This guy was retired.
[00:11:27] So there naturally are going to be questions of was he out of the game too long? You know, he had a quote the other day where he paraphrasing here, but just like lack of a better word, like underestimated the state of the sec. So that's a little concerning to hear because did that not come up in the interview process?
[00:11:54] You know, like, was Monary saying he was more in tune with the league than he really was and Ray Tanner felt comfortable hiring him, or did he think that he was, you know, in tune and was maybe not exactly doing the exact homework he needed? I don't know. There's a major, major, major disconnect in that clubhouse right now.
[00:12:22] And like, yes, you may have lost some key good pieces, but there's still talent on the team not to lose 22 to 3.
[00:12:36] I think there's just, I don't think the, these players have responded to Minary. I think Monary might be a little bit out of touch with the current state of things in the sec. I think Monary might have thought that the roster was different than when he rolled up Here, I don't know. But right now, this is as bad as it gets. I mean, we're on pace I like, for one of the worst seasons, certainly in the modern era, in the, I mean, the post Ray Tanner era.
[00:13:16] I don't have the record books in front of me, but it feels like it could be one of the worst ever.
[00:13:21] So it's tricky, man. Like, that's bad. You know, it's bad. So I don't know what you do. You know, it might be a situation where, you know, we have a new athletic director who inherited this hire.
[00:13:41] It was a little bit of an outside the box hire. It's not this massive 10 year deal. Right.
[00:13:48] Maybe Donati decides to go in a different direction because you know he's going to be hearing this, that this program that means a lot to our fans has fallen off a cliff.
[00:14:02] I mean, think about it like Kingston, we were running out of town simply because he was not progressing far enough in the postseason this year. Are you kidding me?
[00:14:17] Like, if we, if we knew what we were signing up for. Yeah, I'll take a. I'll take a regional first, first round exit compared to this, this was. This is a series that I don't like. It's. It's a crossroad of a series where if you're gonna ride with Monary through this year and into next, you're gonna see a lot of attrition, you're gonna see players hitting the portal, you're gonna basically see a hard reset where Monary is gonna have more of his hands on the roster.
[00:14:57] Or you make a decision and you say, you know what, we're actually going to take this thing in a different direction. And I think both parties actually would be okay with that.
[00:15:09] I don't know. I think it's a combination of it all. Where South Carolina's roster was going to take a step back, this team might have taken a step back regardless.
[00:15:24] But I do think that Monary probably underestimated how good the SEC is now.
[00:15:33] And I think some of the old tricks of the trade are not as effective as they once were.
[00:15:41] Not able to create the correct culture in that locker room.
[00:15:45] And it's just not working. It's just not working. So it's frustrating to see and it's sad. You know, like we had it a little bit in that. In the end of the Kingston era, where maybe there wasn't as much die hard baseball fandom as there was before he got hired.
[00:16:04] Now it's just there's a lot of apathy and sadness around this program because we want it to be so good. You know, it's a program and a sport that we take a lot of pride in. You know, it was South Carolina. Like, maybe historically on football was just kind of okay, but we had baseball.
[00:16:33] You know, like, women's basketball has been a smashing success, but that's only with, you know, really. Don Staley. Right. So historically. And historically, that entire sport really has come leaps and bounds. Basketball, you've had some flashes, for sure. You know, you got some good years, got some good players you can look back on, but no one's gonna say we're a basketball school.
[00:16:58] It was baseball, and we had what was once, like, almost a crown jewel of stadiums, and we had a crown jewel of a program, and other places and other programs have caught up to us, and now we're in a position where you're just drastically behind. And so, yeah, one of the two things has to happen. And so it's going to be very interesting to see over the next week or two what happens.
[00:17:32] So we'll see. We'll see. But with that, y'all, that wraps up this episode. Please follow me on social media, Twitter, or X is Cox Gamecocks. Instagram is just the name of the show. Cox Talking Gamecocks. And please, like, subscribe and review the podcast. I appreciate all y'all. Go Cox.
