Everything Mark Kingston said previewing South Carolina's series with Georgia
Ahead of South Carolina’s huge three-game series with Georgia, head coach Mark Kingston met with the local media to discuss the weekend and more. Here’s what he had to say.
Opening statement
“Well, another big SEC weekend. Two teams that are borderline top 10 in the country. So it should be a great environment. Hopefully we are having a packed house all weekend. And hopefully we play great baseball for our fans.”
On how you pitch to Georgia slugger Charlie Condon
“You throw the ball to the backstop and make sure he doesn’t steal second base.”
On what Garrett Gainey has meant to the team and how he has improved this season
“He’s improved in all kinds of ways. I think both physically in terms of his mechanics are his good as they’ve ever been, which has led to better velocity and more control. He’s learned over the course of the year early in the season, he was just overpowering people. And then he got into the league and realized he couldn’t do that. So he’s had to make an adjustment to that. He’s become more of a pitcher as of late, and he’s mixing his pitches much more than he was early in the season. So I’ve seen him evolve. His velocity is up from where it’s been in the past. I think from a maturity standpoint, he’s kind of like a wild bull at times where you’ve got to teach him to harness it properly. But you also don’t want to take away his emotion and his passion. And you never want to do that as a coach. I think as a coach, you can really teach him how to harness it and help him to use it to his advantage. So I think he’s improved in a lot of different ways.”
On what the weekend rotation will be
“We’ll go Kimball, Jones, TBA.”
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On looking at how important this weekend could be in terms of inching closer to being a national seed
“I mean, as a coach, you look at everything possible. But talking about it, belaboring a point brings no value. The only value that a team needs is how to prepare for the next game and you try to win that game. And if you do that enough then those things take care of themselves, they become byproducts. You can’t say, ‘I want this or I want that,’ it doesn’t make those things happen. Winning games and then reverse engineering how to win games on that day, that’s what get you where you want to go.”
On the way Cole Messina has played as of late both offensively and defensively
“Well, behind the plate defensively, he’s been regarded as one of the best in the country all year. And I think that’s warranted. He’s done a great job of when he gets chance to control the run game. He does a great job with pitch framing when there are borderline pitches. And then offensively, I think his mechanics are in a really good spot right now. I think he has really locked into where he needs to be and what his thought process needs to be, which leads to the right physical mechanics. He’s just in a really good spot right now and hopefully that carries on through the rest of the season.”
On ways to get Condon out
“When you hit .459 with 33 homers, 1.100 slugging and an almost .600 on-base percentage, yeah, I don’t think there’s really any way to get him out — there’s just not. So you’ve got to try to minimize his damage. You’ve got to try to do the best you can of limiting his impact on a game. And that’s really all you can do when a guy has those kinds of stats. Those are the kind of stats that would make Barry Bonds blush. It’s incredible.”
On what about the culture has allowed the newcomers to make an impact
“Well, I think we recruited good players out of the portal, guys we thought would fit both on the field and in the locker room. I think that’s important. I think it’s pretty well documented now that the culture we have right now is of hard-working but we’re also going to allow you to have some freedom to be yourself and enjoy this process. So I think that’s attractive to good players. They want to play in the SEC, they want to play at South Carolina. And then when they know they’re coming to a place that will be very accepting of them and welcome them in if they can help win games. I think it makes for a good combination. So I just think it’s a combination of good players that feel comfortable and are playing very well.”
On Georgia’s pitching staff
“It’s talented guys that are starting to hit their groove. That’s what it comes down to. All year, they’ve been known as a premier offensive team. But pitching wise, they obviously have made progress as the year has gone on. So I think it’s a complete team.”
On how the defense has looked since the switch for more offense in the lineup
“We’re fielding .975 since we kind of shuffled the infield around, which is more than acceptable with the amount of offense we’re getting. As I said, it’s like everything. There’s always give and take, but we made the decision that we needed to score more runs than we were. And if that means we have to take a step back defensively, we were willing to make that concession. I think in the last eight, nine, 10 games, we’re averaging close to 10 runs a game. So it’s something we’ll continue to do until we feel like we can’t.”
On what Austin Brinling did to put himself in a position to be in the everyday lineup and how proud he is to see him go in there and make an impact
“Yeah, very proud, because he handled the entire process with nothing but class. You love when guys handle their business properly and get rewarded by the game. So that’s number one. Number two, when he came here, we recruited him because he had really good stats. He had a .500 on-base percentage, he hit .386 I think it was last year. That was a guy we thought he could be what he is right now. But he came in with a little bit of a hitch in his swing. And it’s something that he needed to fix. Him and our coaches worked very hard on that. You could see in batting practice that it had started to get ironed out. And then one day, we had a live at-bats session where pitchers that needed some innings and hitters that needed some at-bats went out and they faced each other. I think he was 6-for-7 that day. I watched every pitch and how he took the pitches and his quality contact. And I thought this guy deserves a shot. I mean, we need a little spark, maybe this guy will provide that spark, and he sure has. You’re really happy for him. The thing that was holding him back with hitting SEC caliber velocity, because he had a poor fall, he just did. But he made the adjustments and that’s what this game is. It’s about adjustments, it’s about improving minor flaws that may be holding you back. He’s done that and now he’s playing extremely well.”
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On if Gainey can be a potential option as a starter or opener if need be
“Well, as you’ve seen, I’m not afraid to try different things to try to get us a little bit closer to where we could be 100 percent capacity. That’s been jostled around a little bit in our coaching staff, do we need to find a different role, a better role for him? I think what you’ve seen with him, especially starting last week, is his outing was longer. Much like a Ty Good coming out of the bullpen, almost as a secondary starter if you will. I think Gainey may eventually grow into that. But we may also have one game in the postseason where we pull a Michael Roth out and just say, ‘You’re going to start the first game.’ And I know Michael’s first start was in the College World Series. That turned out pretty well. So I don’t think you can ever be scared of trying something that your gut tells you might really help the team. Everything’s always on the table.”
On Ethan Petry’s consistency at the plate in his two years at Carolina
“He’s a special player. I don’t think I’m breaking any news by saying he’s a special player. But he’s evolved over the course of this year. He’s had some ups and downs this year. And I think he’s learned a lot about what it’s like to be the hunted instead of the hunter. Last year, nobody knew who he was, he didn’t start Opening Day. And he just kind of exploded onto the scene. This year, everybody knew who he was. And so, he’s been pitched differently. He’s had to make some adjustments. He’s had to learn against Arkansas for example, he saw maybe three or four strikes all weekend. He got impatient and he chased outside the zone and he had a tough weekend. Since that weekend, he’s made adjustments. His strike zone discipline has been very, very good, and he’s had great success. So I just think with the young hitters like him, it’s really important that they continue to learn what the game’s going to do to them and then the adjustments they make back. So I think it’s been a really fun process to watch that with him.”
On how important hitting .300 is to him from a lineup standpoint with five of the first six guys hitting above that mark
“.300 is kind of the old-fashioned number of hey, when a guy hits .300 you know he’s a good hitter. And I still place value on that because it is hard to get hits. We’ve gone back and forth in the moneyball era of batting average means nothing, it’s all about on-base percentage. And then you have OPS, then you have OPS+. There’s a million different NASA stats that they have out there. But I still there’s some value to just the .300 hitter. The ability to get hits is hard. When you face teams who throw strikes, on-base percentage tends to go down cause you don’t walk as much. So the ability to get hits can be important. So all that is to say it’s nice having .300 hitters throughout our lineup. But on-base percentage is still important, slugging percentage is still important, it’s all still important. Batting average with runners in scoring position, getting runners in with a runner at third and less than two outs is important. What are your left-right splits? Those are important. All those things are important. And at the end of the day, you want to have nine guys that feel like they all complement each other. We’ve gone to the right-left-right-left-right-left, which I think has really helped us. And so, all those factors matter.”
On if he finds himself having more fun now
“Well, I think the more fun they have, the more fun I have. It seems like the more fun and relaxed our guys have, the better they play. From a sports psychology standpoint, there’s some credibility behind that. If you’re relaxed and focused and you allow yourself to enjoy it, you tend to play better no matter what the sport is. That’s going to continue to be our focus is compete your butts off, have a lot of fun and let’s see what happens. And I think the guys are really enjoying that.”
On how eliminating scholarship limits could impact the game
“I’ve always said im very much for baseball players getting more scholarships. We have 11.7 for 40 guys. That’s unacceptable, it really is. It always has been and always will be if it doesn’t change. So I am for more baseball players getting treated like basketball, like football, because we have 10,000 people out there — it’s a revenue sport, especially in our league. So I think our baseball players put in a lot of time and effort. They bring in a lot of money to these schools. And so, I think the scholarship standards for baseball players should be the same as those other sports. Just my personal opinion.”
