GamecockScoop – What ‘A year that we won’t forget’ means for South Carolina baseball

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — At several points of South Carolina’s 42-21 season that ended with a Super Regional sweep at Florida, the expectations were different.

Pre-season it was about trying to respond from 2022, the program’s second-worst final record since 1970. After 40 games, it felt like Omaha was the only realistic expectation with the team 34-6 and ranked No. 3 in the country. And then came the swoon, a 5-13 stretch that nearly knocked the team out of regional-hosting consideration and drastically lowered expectations for everyone involved.

And up until the final out of South Carolina’s 4-0 loss at No. 2 seed Florida at Condron Ballpark, Omaha again.

“It’s truly nothing that I’ve experienced before,” starting pitcher Jack Mahoney said. “It was being a part of a group that the only voice that mattered was the voice inside that building. Having a leader like Coach King, having a leader like Monte [Lee], and the guys in the locker room too. Sometimes it gets a little rough around here when you’re losing, if I’m being honest. And we didn’t care. We knew we were good, we knew we were going to make a run and we just loved each other every day.”

Evaluating a season as topsy-turvy as the one South Carolina just finished with a linear narrative is difficult, and almost presents itself like a Rorschach test. How do you grade this out?

Certainly the goal will never change at South Carolina; 11 trips to Omaha and two National Championships permanently set the bar at being one of the nation’s elite programs. But for this team specifically, it can be sliced multiple ways.

An overachieving team for sure, one that had little pre-season buzz and ended up being the most successful of the Mark Kingston era. It was South Carolina’s first 40-win season since 2016, first trip to a Super Regional since 2018 and best SEC record of the Kingston era. It captivated Columbia in a way a South Carolina baseball team has not in years, all of it exploding in a dominant home regional sweep.

That part was unexpected, especially from a team which added 10 players in the transfer portal pre-season in a full-scale roster overhaul.

“Sometimes the best teams don’t get to Omaha,” Kingston said. “I think we’re one of the best eight teams in the country, but because of some things that happened we had to come on the road for a Super Regional against a team that has a good chance to win the National Championship. It doesn’t mean that we’re not one of the elite teams in the country.”

That part is undoubtedly true; South Carolina had as tough of a draw as possible for the Super Regional.

It was also — if you choose to look at it as such — self-inflicted.

South Carolina was ranked No. 3 in the country after 40 games, tracking to host both a regional and a Super Regional. And then came the struggles, thick and fast. Four straight series losses to end the year, a 1-2 finish in the SEC Tournament and enough losses to knock the team out of a chance to host games this weekend. It got the No. 15 national seed, meaning a pairing with a “buzzsaw” of a Florida team as Kingston described it.

In that light, 2023 starts to veer towards being a missed opportunity. South Carolina is expected to lose its top four pitchers off this roster in Will Sanders, Noah Hall, Jack Mahoney and James Hicks. Eli Jerzembeck will not pitch next season after undergoing Tommy John surgery last month.

Suddenly pitching depth — the roster’s strength this season — is on shaky ground. South Carolina had a chance to get to Omaha for the first time since 2012 firmly in its grasp through 40 games, but will be ending its season short of the final destination with no guarantees of a similar pitching depth in the future.

“A lot of guys have gotten a taste of the pain of getting this close to Omaha and not getting there,” Kingston said. “We’ll have a lot of guys that will really be driven and have a chip on their shoulder moving forward, and that can be a good thing.”

So which is it? And better question, which will it be? The success or failure of this season might be decided in coming years, with the likes of Ethan Petry and Cole Messina taking the reins as team leaders next year.

“I think the future is very bright in Columbia,” Mahoney said. “You look out on the field and you have so many returning guys, so many returning pieces, so many returning leaders. I think sometimes in this day and age programs fall into a lull when upperclassmen have to leave, but that wasn’t the case here.”

Was this a blip on the radar, like the team’s 2018 Super Regional appearance immediately followed by half a decade off the big stage? Or setting the stage for something bigger, like a one-run loss in game seven of the 2009 regional before three straight trips to Omaha.

Like everything else with this season, it is in the eye of the beholder. But for the players in the locker room who will be back at Founders Park in 2024, their thoughts and lessons from the season will be the takeaway.

Those leaders, and the foundation they left, will be the immediate legacy of this team. Bringing South Carolina baseball back to relevance in the college baseball world, if not all the way back where it feels it belongs. The long-term legacy will depend on what the future looks like, largely based around the players who made this season so unique.

“When this journey is with good people and kids that you really appreciate, it just makes it that much better,” Kingston said. “This was a year that we won’t forget.”

Nobody will forget 2023.

Now the challenge is to make sure they remember it for the right reasons.

****************************************************************************************

For live updates on South Carolina baseball all throughout the offseason, subscribe to the insider’s forum.