Remembering South Carolina baseball's famous celebratory props

If there’s one thing that college baseball teams like South Carolina love to do, it’s have fun. One way teams do this is by using celebratory props.

South Carolina is no stranger to having props in its dugout. Over the years, the Gamecocks have become synonymous with them.

In some cases, they’ve made a difference in winning and losing. With baseball season starting, it’s time to look back at some of the Gamecocks’ most memorable props. And, as the season starts Friday, there could be more on the horizon.

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‘Bat on ball’

South Carolina stumbled into the 2010 NCAA Tournament, putting across one run in two SEC Tournament losses. After falling behind to Bucknell in the NCAA Regional opener, rain started to come down in the fourth inning. Delays caused the game to start again more than an hour later.

For the Gamecocks, it was enough time to try and find the spark it desperately needed.

“I took a fungo bat and taped it because our hitters were not hitting. We were just getting shut down,” Robert Beary said. “I wasn’t playing at the time, but I was trying to get the team and get everyone rallied up. I mean, we worked hard all year not to go lose to Bucknell in our home region tournament. So I took a fungo bat, taped a baseball to it, and I wrote in a ballpoint pen in blue that said, ‘Bat on ball.'”

Beary, a cog on the 2010 Gamecocks’ eventual national championship team, tried to keep his teammates loose during the rain delay while also hoping the taped bat would shift the tide. He didn’t care if they were mad at him for making a joke while losing, so long as something changed on the field.

“I said, ‘This is what a hit looks like. Let’s do it.’ And I made them touch it,” Beary said. “If they didn’t want to touch it, I touched them with it.”

South Carolina left six runners on base in the first three innings. When it took the field after the delay, things started to change. After trailing 5-1 in the sixth, the Gamecocks scored nine runs in the final three innings to secure a victory.

“While people were up to hit, we would adjust the ball angle on the bat. So if we needed a ball to the outfield, and we needed some lift on it, we would adjust it,” Beary said. “I don’t believe in voodoo and all that but every time we did something, somebody hit a ball to the outfield if we had the ball lifted on the bat. Or if we needed, I think we needed Bobby Haney to get a bunt down, and we would angle the ball to get a bunt down, he’d get the bunt down.”

Beary realized the team had something special with the bat after Adrian Morales, who only hit three homers that season, jolted a three-run bomb to give the Gamecocks the cushion it needed to win.

“That’s when Jeff Jones and I looked at each other like, ‘Oh crap, I think we got something here,'” he said.

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After the win, the taped bat would need a name if it were going to be remembered in the history books. At the time, James Cameron’s “Avatar” was a smash hit at the box office.

When Beary went to see the movie with Whit Merrifield and Scott Wingo, he had figured out the bat’s name. He dubbed it the Avatar Spirit Stick.

“They did some weird things in the movie. They were worshipping a tree that glowed or whatever. So that’s where the Avatar part came into it,” he said. “We kind of started to do this crazy Avatar chant like they did in the movie with the lights off in the locker room and just acting like a bunch of fools but trying to stay loose.”

There was also another movie that the Gamecocks took inspiration from with the bat’s name.

“Growing up, there was that movie ‘Bring it on’ and they had this spirit stick. So the spirit stick couldn’t touch the ground and all that,” Beary said.

Beary selected Patrick Sullivan, a redshirt freshman right-hander, to protect the spirit stick from any harm. He believed Sullivan was a great team guy who would take it seriously.

“I told Pat that he had to guard it with his life and he couldn’t let it touch the ground,” Beary said. “And I guess he took it with a couple of other pitchers and they basically bedazzled it with different colors of athletic tape. That’s where it completely evolved.”

As the Gamecocks started piling up wins, the spirit stick lived on. It reached a point in which fan demand saw t-shirts made with the spirit stick on them.

The spirit stick even made the trip to Omaha, where South Carolina went on to defeat UCLA in the College World Series.

“I mean, like all baseball players, if it’s working and there’s magic,” Beary said. “Then you keep doing it until it doesn’t.”

Where are the spirit stick’s whereabouts more than 12 years later? Beary said the bat is protected in a glass case at Founders Park.

One thing that has always stuck with Beary is the way the team had fun. He still remembers when former all-star shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, who was announcing games for ESPN in 2010, made a comment about how they acted in the dugout.

“We’d be down by one tie ballgame late in the game or up by one and we were goofing off but in a relaxed manner — not in a manner that we didn’t care,” Beary said. “(Garciaparra) goes, ‘That reminds us when I played on the Red Sox when we made our run, we were so relaxed in the dugout and had so much fun just playing the game.’ That’s hard to beat, no matter what.”

Fear the Fish

Columbia usually turns into a ghost town with many college students going home for Christmas break. In January 2012, with students still not back yet, LB Dantzler was on campus preparing for baseball season. When he had occasional free time, he got bored quickly and decided to buy a fish.

Keeping up with Reptar, the name of the fish, while the season was going on would be tough. But Dantzler convinced his neighbor to feed the fish while he was on the road.

Then, he faced a tough decision. His neighbor was out of town and South Carolina was preparing for a weekend trip to Auburn. It was either leave the fish to starve or take him on the road.

Dantzler decided to bring Reptar on the team bus for a nearly five-hour drive to Auburn.

“I thought it would be funny to bring a fish on the bus,” Dantzler said. “Tanner English was my roommate on all our road trips. So he had this little Tupperware container and put him on the bus.”

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Ten years after that fateful bus ride, English still can’t believe how it all went down.

“I don’t even know how that happened,” he said. “All I know is that we traveled with this fish, and he was in our hotel room. He was on the bus. He was with us. And it was just a thing.”

While Dantzler was sitting on the bus, his teammate, Bryson Celek, came up with an idea for a new rallying cry. After winning back-to-back national championships, South Carolina was struggling in SEC play. It dropped a pair of series to Kentucky and Florida. Something needed to change. 

Dantzler was hesitant at first but ultimately agreed to make it happen if it was going to help them get their mojo back.

“We practiced Thursday and then Friday, Bryson was texting me. He’s like, ‘Hey, dude, I talked to Christian (Walker), I think we’re going to do it,” Dantzler said. “So, I just snapped a picture walking out the door, took my hat off, and set it on top of the little Tupperware that Tanner had snapped the picture of it and just tweeted ‘Fear the Fish.’”

Come game time, South Carolina was struggling against Auburn right-hander Jon Luke Jacobs. Down by a run in the sixth, Walker hit a two-run triple to give the Gamecocks some life. 

As he dove into third base, Walker stood his hand up at a 90-degree angle on top of his helmet, mimicking a fish fin. Immediately after, as Dantzler rounded the bases after crushing a two-run homer, he struck the same pose. 

Fear the Fish was officially born.

“I just remember going to bed not thinking much of it. But I was being interviewed the next day in batting practice and everybody was asking me about it,” Dantzler said. “Got back to Columbia, T-shirts were made. So, it just kind of took a life of its own.”

As Reptar’s fame grew, the Gamecocks’ play took off. Although they fell early in the SEC Tournament, they won in the regional and super regional to head back to Omaha for a third straight year.

History was on the doorstep. All South Carolina had to do was pummel through a couple more teams and it would be crowned a champion once again. But it didn’t work out that way. It lost in the championship series to Arizona, who won it all for the first time since 1986.

“If you get a good team, playing really good at the right moment, that’s a team that usually wins the national championship,” Grayson Greiner said. “My worst memory was I made the last out flying out to right field, so I had to run past the dogpile and that wasn’t a lot of fun.”

Less than a month after the season ended, Reptar passed away.

“It actually died the day that coach (Ray) Tanner announced he was leaving,” Dantzler said. “I got a text or tweet or something and saw coach Tanner was leaving. I’m like, ‘Son of a gun. That’s pretty big news.’ I stayed in Columbia that summer just to work out, take some summer classes. And I got home from the stadium and he was dead.”

Since the days of Dantzler’s pet betta fish, South Carolina hasn’t made it back to the College World Series.

Casting spells and winning games

Wes Clarke and Brady Allen were notorious for having fun during their playing days at South Carolina. They would always find Mark Kingston and pitch him “a thousand of just the stupidest ideas” to keep the team loose. Most of the time, he immediately turned them down. Then, something changed in 2021.

“We were leaders, but we were also goofballs on the team,” Clarke said. “So, we were like, ‘Let’s get something that represents our humor.”

Allen brought in a plastic scythe featuring a dual blade. It was part of an old grim reaper Halloween costume.

The scythe made its debut early on in the season. Any time a player did something good, they would receive the prop to hold.

Eventually, the plastic weapon broke in half, putting the two friends in a dilemma. Then, Founders Park groundskeeper Justin Scurry came to the rescue.

“Just out of nowhere, he showed up with the best-looking scythe we’d ever seen,” Clarke said. “It was the coolest thing.”

Scurry gifted the Gamecocks with a real scythe. Not another plastic version but a tool with a curved blade at the end of a long pole.

From there, it became a staple for the team throughout the rest of the season.

Coming as a complete surprise, Kingston, who had previously strayed away from Clarke and Allen’s goofy ideas, started to go along with it.

“I was sitting right next to coach Kingston in the tunnel on the top step and Wes was up to bat,” Allen said. “Kingston gives signs from the dugout, so Wes was looking at him and I go, ‘Kingston start casting spells on him.’ So Kingston literally started acting like he was doing signs and casted spells on him.”

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Kingston’s spells worked on Clarke, who hit 23 homers, tied for second in South Carolina’s single-season records.

“You could tell Wes wanted to hold (the scythe) a lot because after he hit a homer, he got it, and he hit plenty of those,” Allen said.

Kingston believes his views have changed on such matters of fun.

“I used to be a micromanager and we’re going to do things very old school,” he said. “And so, I still do believe in the old school values and ethics and all those things. But I’m not against letting the guys have a little fun and be loose and enjoy their time. So as long as it’s within reason, it doesn’t disrespect the game or the opponents and the umpires. I’ve gotten a little bit more relaxed in those areas.”

The Gamecocks were playing at a high level, starting off the season 11-0. After pulling off consecutive walk-off wins against rival Clemson, Clarke and Allen started thinking of what they could do with the scythe for future wins.

“We would go over scenarios in our apartment, getting the game-winning hit and what we were going to do with the scythe. So it definitely provided motivation,” Clarke said.

Even the other South Carolina players slowly began buying into what their two teammates had created.

“We were on such a run with that thing, man, and it became real popular,” Jack Mahoney said. “So we kind of loved having that in the dugout, especially when we would sneak it into King’s postgame interviews.”

Just as the Avatar Spirit Stick gained love from the fans, so did the scythe. T-shirts and other merchandise were produced with the now trademark weapon plastered everywhere.

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Two years later, with Clarke and Allen both pursuing their MLB dreams in the Milwaukee Brewers and Miami Marlins organizations, there’s a chance the prop could make a return.

As the two imagined what their first game against each other would be like in the big leagues, the scythe, of course, came into the picture.

“I think that could be like our trophy. Whoever wins the game or does better gets to have it,” Allen said.

A relic from Davy Crockett

If South Carolina was going to find a way to top the scythe, it would be awfully tough. The Gamecocks struggled to start in 2022, not being able to find the same magic it had the year before.

“Last year, I remember we would skid for a while and then all of a sudden, I remember Evan Stone brought that thing in the locker room and we were like, ‘What is that?'” Mahoney said.

That “thing” Mahoney remembered Stone randomly bringing into the Gamecocks’ locker room was a coonskin cap. It’s a hat fashioned from the skin and fur of a raccoon, famously associated with Davy Crockett.

Mesmerized by the beauty of the cap, everyone wanted a piece of it. And so, the Gamecocks started to play better.

“All of a sudden, we’re riffing off series wins and there’s a new kind of energy,” Mahoney said.

A player would be crowned with the coonskin cap after hitting a home run. Stone would usually be waiting for them near home plate to place it on their heads going into the dugout.

“That stuff is all cool. It’s just like extra motivation,” Will Sanders said. “It’s just everybody wants to wear the hat when they do something to help our team.”

While a fun prop, the coonskin cap wasn’t as effective. South Carolina suffered its first losing season since 1996. Heading into 2023, there’s newfound optimism that the team can play better and find a better celebratory prop.

“We’ve got something special coming this year,” Sanders said. “We don’t really think about it like that but we’ve definitely got something special this year.”

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