Everything Mark Kingston said after South Carolina's walk-off win over Kentucky
After South Carolina’s improbable 6-5 win over Kentucky, head coach Mark Kingston met with the media on Friday to break down the game. Here’s what he had to say.
Opening statement
“I’ve been waiting to say it, but I think that was one of those where Tommy Moody was watching us from above and helped kind of nudge that ball out of the ballpark. That’s as good of a win as we’ve had this year, obviously. Sometimes you have to come up here after a loss and just say, man, that’s just baseball. Tonight, we won a game and it’s hard to figure out how we did it other than sometimes that’s just baseball. And the kids just didn’t give up. Five runs in the last two innings after really struggling for the first eight. Just really proud of that group. I told them they deserve that win because of how they’ve handled a lot of things. So, real happy for that group and we’ve got to build on it.”
On if this could be the game where things turn around for the team
“Well, you really hope so. But again, momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher. That was said a long time ago by some very smart baseball people. What it means today is that we beat a team today that was 15-3 in the league when we were down by three runs in the ninth inning. I mean, that’s something that our guys will be able to draw on for the rest of the year. Whether it creates momentum, we’ll see. But they showed a lot of heart tonight, they did. You can’t question the heart of that team. They just kept playing. And I’m so happy for Blake for having such a great night. Roman I thought was really good again. Ty was really good again. Those guys as our Friday night starters is basically what they are. Eight innings, three earned runs against the fourth-ranked team in the country. Real happy with them.”
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On decision to bring in Dalton Reeves and Gavin Casas to pinch hit in the ninth inning and seeing it pay off
“Look, it’s all about them getting an opportunity and taking advantage of it. Obviously, Gavin has had some good moments and some not so good moments this year. Tonight was a great moment. You like to see it cause he works hard. He works really hard, all these guys work really hard. It just felt like the right move at the right time. We were running out of outs. And so we had what we thought were probably better chances to extend the game with those hitters coming in. And we gave them an opportunity. As a coach, that’s all you can do, provide the opportunity and then hope they make the most of it. And tonight, those guys clearly made the most of it.”
On Talmadge LeCroy’s leaping grab at shortstop in the 10th inning
“We worked on that stuff all week. With Tippett being out, sometimes necessity is the mother of invention is what they say. And we had to kind of invent a new infield because of that. Sometimes you get led somewhere that maybe is a good place to be. That was a big play. Gavin’s more than capable of playing third. LeCroy loves when we put him over at shortstop. I thought Petry did a nice job at first base tonight. So again, we’ve said it for a while now, we’re not afraid to experiment, we’re not afraid to try something that might push us a little bit forward.”
On what feeling he sensed from the players in those late innings
“It’s probably a little normal to feel deflated at that point, especially with the leadoff walk that led to it. But look, I didn’t sense any give up. This is just not a group that’s going to give up. How you handle that disappointment of giving up the three spot in the ninth, scoring three and then giving up one more in the 10th, how you handle that disappointment gives you a chance to come back. And we handled it in a way that we didn’t pack the tents in. Guys came in and just said let’s do it again, let’s have another good inning. And they did it. For eight innings, we couldn’t do it, and somehow for the ninth and 10th innings against really good bullpen guys from Kentucky, somehow it happened. It’s baseball. You hate when we say that’s baseball after a loss but after a win sometimes you just say that’s baseball.”
On what he saw on Blake Jackson’s walk-off homer
“I think Tommy helped blow that ball out of the ballpark today. I can’t think of another logical explanation other than that. Off the bat, I thought it was going to push the left fielder back a little bit. I certainly did not think it was going to end up as a home run. The ball hasn’t been carrying at night here this year, hardly at all. But tonight late, it certainly carried for us.”
On Ty Good’s outing
“He gave us five innings. We look at him and Roman as almost our Friday night starters. You know Roman’s going to give you between two and four innings, and Ty’s going to come in and see how far he can go. At 80 pitches, you could tell he was running out of gas. I looked at Matt, he had dominated for a long time, but Matt just looked at me and said he’s out of gas. And so we had to go to the next guy. But he was great tonight.”
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On keeping Good out there for the ninth
“Some of the toughest decisions you have as a manager or a head coach is when to get a guy out. Ty is as good of a competitor as we have. So he walks a guy and you’re thinking, ‘Okay, I have two avenues to go here. He’s either out of gas, let’s get the next guy in, or he’s been dominating and he deserves the right to stay in there and see if he’s got any more left in the tank.’ We opted to see if he had any more left in the tank because we respect what a competitor he is. But once that second guy got on, it just felt like it was time.”
On what worked against Kentucky’s Johnny Hummel in the ninth
“From our vantage point, we can’t see in and out. You can see height, but until I go back and look at the video to see where those pitches were, it’s hard for me to say they were bad pitches, they were good pitches. Sometimes a good pitch turns into a homer, sometimes a bad pitch turns into an out. I’d have to go back to the video cause from the dugout it’s not a great angle to really evaluate how good a pitch was.”
On how the players met the moment
“That doesn’t happen because you gave a pep talk today. That happens because you try to have a consistent program where the guys support each other from day one and they create that environment. Those comebacks are not created with a pep talk in the ninth inning. They’re built because you try to maintain a level of consistency in an environment where guys will keep fighting until that last out. I know we have that and it showed up tonight.”
On if he saw a two-homer game coming from Jackson
“He had been swinging it better lately, there’s no question about it. He had the big pinch hit last week against Arkansas on a Friday night. He appears to really like Friday nights, Friday night lights. He’s a former football player from Texas, so maybe that has something to do with it. But obviously, when the guys play like that, they get more run. That’s the thing, we keep trying to figure out who are going to be the best nine guys and a guy has a great game kind of like this. So we’re just continuing to try to search for the guys who will give us the most good at-bats. When we look up and we have 36 at-bats, we want to try to get as many of those to be quality at-bats as possible. We just have to keep experimenting.”
On what went into making the lineup for Friday and the changes behind it
“We were going to play our most speedy and athletic players and see if that would help us. We’ve looked it up and when we score six runs we’re now 10-3. And so six runs for us is the target. We hadn’t been doing it by waiting for the home run. So ironically on the day where we play all our speed and athletic guys, seeing if we can get to six runs that way, it wasn’t until late in the game where we hit homers to get to that six-run mark. We’re just going to keep looking and searching until it all comes together, and hopefully it will at the right time.”
