Everything Mark Kingston said after South Carolina's series win over Kentucky
Following South Carolina’s 10-0 win over Kentucky on Sunday, head coach Mark Kingston met with the media to break down the game. Here’s what he had to say.
Opening statement
“Praise Jesus on that one, I’ll start out like that. Obviously to respond like that after a tough loss last night, a loss that could’ve gone either way, I just thought this was probably one of our best weekends of the year. Offensively, clearly one of our best offensive weekends of the year. So, really proud. Want to start with Dylan Eskew — tremendous outing, tremendous when we needed it. It was everything we could’ve hoped for. 6.1 shutout innings and then Connor McCreery came in there with that power stuff. Just everything we hoped we would see today.”
“Before we go any further, I would just like to recognize Mr. Lindell Bradley, who was here this weekend, who I’m so proud to get to know and meet this weekend. Just want to welcome you back here. What you’ve done is extremely impressive. So I just want to thank you for being here all weekend.”
On defense showing up big today
“Every team has the nine they think is their best defense. Every team has what they think is their best nine, that’s their best offense. You generally try to find the best mix of that, and sometimes you have to make a sacrifice. If you think you need more offense, you’ve got to sacrifice a little bit defensively and vice versa. We just felt like we needed to jump start the offense a little bit, put our best nine hitters in there that would give us some length in that lineup. It’s obviously paid off for us this weekend. Defensively, the good thing is our assistant coaches do such a great job doing homework on spray charts and trying to figure out where the balls are most likely to go. So when you do that, you can mitigate maybe a little bit less range because of that. So I think you just combine all those things and it felt like the right time to give that a shot and it worked really well this weekend.”
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On what worked so well for Eskew today
“After the 15-13 game last night, what you saw today were two very heavy sinker ball pitchers. The first five half innings going to the bottom of the third, no one could get the ball off the ground. So you saw a lot of ground ball outs, you saw a lot of quick outs. That’s what Dylan is. Their guy, I think he was 7-0 coming in today, he had heavy sink and Dylan was the same way. Dylan was just a little bit better today over the course of the game. He threw strikes today, only had one walk in six-plus innings. When he does that with the movement on his fastball, you’ve got a guy that can do what he just did against a top-five team in the country.”
On if this starting lineup is the best combination he’s had all year
“I would say it would be hard to argue that right now, right? And you still have a Will Tippett who’s working to get back. But it’s hard to argue with the offensive production we got this weekend. It just felt like as you get to the bottom of the lineup, some really good things can happen. Casas hit in the nine-hole today and was 2-for-4 with a run on an RBI. He took some good at-bats and made all the plays defensively that I can remember. You want to have your best team when it matters the most, when the games decide who stays and who goes home. And so, we’ll continue to look at everything that we think might get us a little bit better and then evaluate as we go.”
On what happened on Ethan Petry’s homer in the third that turned into a two-run single
“Well, that’s exactly what they asked me on the SEC Network. When you know that you’re going to be on the SEC Network where coaches interview the following inning, you hope nothing crazy happens that you’re going to have to address when they ask you. As soon as that happened, I knew that would be the question in the in-game interview. Basically what you had there was a very excited Ethan Petry who saw the ball leave the park and forgot to look at the guy in front of him. He’s hit probably 150 homers in his life and that’s probably never happened to him before and will never happen again because he’s learned the lesson. In the back of his mind, I think he expected that the runner would be well off to second base and that he wouldn’t have to worry about it. I’ve got to look at the video to see where I think the runner should’ve been. But at the end of the day, it’s always the backside runners responsibility not to pass the guy in front of him under any circumstances. He’ll learn from that.”
On what it meant to have Bradley here this weekend
“We had our best weekend of the year I would say, so I’m going to give him all the credit. And I’m going to invite him to be an honorary assistant coach if he’s willing to take on that role.”
Bradley says he’s got two of years of eligibility left, Kingston says: “Well, let’s go then, come on. Come on, let’s go.”
“Obviously what he’s done for this university is obviously now very well documented. I’m so happy we were able to honor him with an entire weekend. He spoke to our team Friday and our kids were very excited to meet somebody so noteworthy. And then he threw out the first pitch today. I didn’t get the radar reading so I don’t know how fast it was. It looked pretty good, though. You can’t argue with the impact he’s had on our university. Just really happy we could honor him with such a great weekend. Based on the body language of Lindell and the family, it looks like they had a great weekend. And I’m so happy for him, so happy.”
On going 2-for-2 on replay challenges today
“There’s a few things that go into that. Number one, I tell our players, give me the signal if you’re about 90 percent that it’s going to go our way. So I trust our guys. I trusted Petry, he seemed pretty confident. You can read the body language of a player, are they just selling you a line, or do they really believe in what they’re telling you? I thought his body language was really good. And then the one with Cole, I walked by Cole towards the umpires. I was trying to figure out what to do, and he said, ‘Coach, I think I got in there.’ So number one, you trust your players. If they tell you we should look at it, we look at it. And my second thought on that is I have, knock on wood, yet to ever run out of challenges. Late in the game, you can go to an umpire if you’re out of challenges and say, ‘Hey, I still think you guys need to look at that.’ So until I run out of challenges, I’m going to be pretty aggressive with using them. You can’t take them into the next game, you can’t store them up. If you think there’s any chance on a play that might help you, nine times out of 10 I’m going to roll the dice. You really don’t have anything to lose.”
On feeling of seeing the guys come through after some tough losses this year
“It was great to see. Look, that’s a top-five team we played and that seems like all we’ve played for the last six weeks is top-five teams. They talk about Quad I wins, that’s something people talk about all the time. But that’s 25 teams, you could play 21, 22, 23, 24 and get full credit for Quad I wins. We’re playing No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4. So our Quad I wins in overall games, I think we’re up to 23 or 24, which is as high as anyone in the country. So to win this game, and we’ve been talking about getting over that last hump. We’ve been going toe to toe with Arkansas and A&M and all these teams, to have the No. 4 team come in that was 15-3 in our league before the weekend, to come in and go 2-1 vs. them, and last night could’ve gone either way too. I think that’s something that will really give our guys some confidence that we really know now, not only can we go toe to toe with anybody, we can beat anybody. And I think that will be important.”
On adjustments to bring runners home
“Yeah, we just waved that magic wand today. That’s all it took. I think again, it’s not a coincidence that we made the commitment to maybe add a few more bats to the lineup. With the thought of what will it do to our defense, we added a few more veteran bats with a lot of at-bats under their belt. It just kind of helps it keep going and taking a little bit better at-bats. I just think, at the end of the day, how you drive in runs is you have short efficient swings. You make good swing decisions, you swing at the right pitches, and you try to stay relaxed in the moment. You stay under control. When we do that, we can score 10 runs, we can score 13 runs like we did the last two days. But the game’s not easy. I think sometimes it’s easy to think these kids should just hit .400 all the time. The game’s hard and our league is the hardest league in America. Our guys have been battling all year. I’m hoping we are now kind of hitting our groove.”
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On Talmadge LeCroy playing shortstop this weekend versus regularly playing third base
“There’s give and take. He was a high school shortstop, so he’s always begging me to get reps at shortstop. The reason why he’s been more of a third baseman is foot speed. Pretty simple. I generally like guys that are really fast at shortstop, they just have more range. But again, when you have to pick and choose what’s the best total combination of an offense and a defense, you’re willing to maybe sacrifice a little bit of range if it helps your offense. The good thing is on the routine plays, he’s been really good. Knock on wood, he’s been really good. So I think it’s energized him a little bit out there defensively. He’s made all the routine plays. He’s started some really key double plays, he’s finished some double plays. He just likes being out there in the middle of the field. And again for this weekend, it kind of energized us.”
On Kennedy Jones’ big weekend
“We brought him in here to be a middle of the order hitter and he’s been that for a great majority of the year. And look, the game is going to humble you at times. He’s had some great moments, he’s had some tough moments as they all have, as we all have. The good thing is he bounced back today just to kind of show he has the ability and maturity to play at this level. That’s all you can ask out of your players. If you have a tough day, you can flush it and be ready to go the next day. He proved that today.”
On if he starts looking at what he’s got to do to host a regional in the NCAA Tournament
“I mean, I look at it, I’m not going to tell you we ignore it. You look at it cause the job of the head coach is to be aware of everything. But you don’t talk about it with your team that much. You know what you need to do to have those things happen. But the message from a coach to the players is here’s what we need to do every day to win a game. And if you do that today and tomorrow and the next day, that stuff starts to take care of itself. But you monitor it just because it’s our job to try to know everything that relates to our team and our program.”
