Offense keeps rolling, South Carolina dominates Winthrop

South Carolina baseball’s offense just keeps flexing its muscle through the early portion of the schedule. 

The Gamecocks put up double-digit runs for the fourth straight game as they cruised past Winthrop 19-3 Tuesday.

It’s the first time South Carolina (4-0) has scored double-digit runs in four straight games since 2006. It’s the first time the Gamecocks have done it to open a season since 1987. 

“It’s not just the power. We’re doing a lot of things well,” Mark Kingston said. I’m happy with a lot of things. It’s early, but we’re showing a lot of good signs.”

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And, like they have through the first two games, they did with the formula of getting on base and driving runs in with homers. 

South Carolina walked 11 times to just nine strikeouts. When the Gamecocks pair it with five more home runs Tuesday that tends to lead to a lot of runs. 

“I see a talented, older lineup. But our young guys have a lot of experience and went out and played summer ball,” Kingston said. “You add a Petry into the mix who’s an extremely talented kid. We’re just taking great at-bats. Monte (Lee’s) done a really nice job giving these guys an identity in what we want them to do daily. It looks good right now.” 

Led by Ethan Petry’s two homers headlined the day. But Braylen Wimmer hit a three-run dinger while Cole Messina launched the first grand slam of his career as part of a sixth-run fifth inning. 

South Carolina now has the same number of grand slams this year (2) as it did in all of 2022. Petry, who started the year on the bench, has come on strong since the season began. 

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He is now 6-for-10 with three home runs to start the season. Over the last two games, both starts for the freshman, he’s 4-for-7 with five runs driven in. 

“You see the contagiousness of walks and hits,” he said. “Then everything with our offense is explosive. Everyone, one through nine, and even guys off the bench are coming in ready to go.”

It helped a highly-touted freshman in Eli Jerzembeck settle into the game and pitch a solid outing in his South Carolina debut.

Jerzembeck had a shaky start, pitching around a one-out double in a 20-pitch first inning, but settled in nicely. He retired eight straight after that, needing just 16 pitches to motor through the next two innings. 

He did hit trouble in the fourth, giving up a pair of singles–one against the shift. Then he gave up an RBI double over Evan Stone’s head in centerfield. 

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His outing ended after four innings where Jerzembeck allowed four hits, didn’t walk anyone and punched out four in the process. 

He needs to learn how to relax a little bit more and channel all of his energy. He was going a little fast at times. Most of the teams in the country right now are using the watch and there are times he was sped up he forgot to look at the watch until he was already on the rubber. Just freshmen stuff,” Kingston said.

“You see the talent. You see the fastball and the command all his offspeed pitches…it was good to see him get out of the jam after the play we didn’t make to give up just one run. Saw a lot of good things from Eli.”

But South Carolina’s offense kept rolling, scoring in six of seven innings to end the game.

The exclamation point came in the sixth inning with Caleb Denny launching his second homer of the season, a 428-foot nuke to right-centerfield capped with a bat-flip.

“That team came out fired up. We knew the pitcher coming in was going to be fired up. We wanted to get him out lickity-split. We ended up doing it. We got to the bullpen, attacked the bullpen arms,” Petry said.

“The chip on our shoulder, we should play like that every game. No matter what’s said on any media, you have to go out there and have a chip on your shoulder no matter who you play.” 

South Carolina now has 19 home runs over the first four games of the season but are still getting on base at a 51.6 percent clip.

“I want to see us be able to get on a good fastball. They had a guy throwing 95 and 96 today. We did a great job making the adjustment,” Kingston said. “They brought in their best lefty after that and we made a great adjustment there. We need to hit all kinds of pitches but I was anxious to see us against a 95-mile-per-hour fastball today. I thought we did great.” 

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Up next: The second of two midweek games kicks off tomorrow at 4 p.m. against Queens. James Hicks (1-0, 0.00 ERA), in his second outing since Tommy John, is scheduled to start. The game can be streamed on the SEC Network Plus and listened to on 107.5 FM. 

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