Scott Davis: Resume the Gamecock baseball resurrection

cott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round (the following is his most recent) and a column during football season that’s published on GamecockCentral.com. To receive Scott’s newsletter every Friday, sign up here.

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We thought we started this process seven years ago.

After a brief false start when the Chad Holbrook regime never quite took South Carolina baseball to the glorious heights we’d become accustomed to reaching under Ray Tanner, we expected a return to excellence when Mark Kingston took the reins back in 2018.

True, most of us knew little about Kingston, who’d had some minor success at South Florida but was not exactly a scalding hot big-time coaching candidate when he arrived in Columbia. And there was also the fact that Kingston’s mild demeanor and unremarkable press conferences didn’t make any of us ready to run through a wall in anticipation of his first season at the helm.

But still. This was South Carolina baseball. This was our sport. This was our thing. The program couldn’t remain in the wilderness for long. The universe wouldn’t let it.

Whether we knew much about him or not, Kingston had to be the guy to bring about the Resurrection. Didn’t he?

But the Resurrection never arrived.

By 2024, the program remained stubbornly asleep, and just as it had during Holbrook’s tenure, Omaha remained nothing more than a city in Nebraska rather than the Gamecock baseball team’s annual destination.

When the Gamecocks drifted to a 13-17 SEC record in 2024 before at last faltering in an NCAA Regional, questions finally started bubbling to the surface: Was this still an elite program? Did South Carolina baseball still matter? Were the Ray Tanner years the program’s peak before a long, steady decline?

This weekend, we’ll try this whole thing again, this time with a veteran coach who holds a College World Series pedigree. Paul Mainieri – who led the LSU Tigers on multiple trips to Omaha and whose team won the 2009 World Series – will be wearing a Gamecock uniform in the home dugout when South Carolina opens the 2025 baseball season today at Founders Park against Sacred Heart.

Mainieri was hired eight months ago, but for Gamecock fans longing to watch championship-level baseball again, it feels like eight years.

Is the Resurrection at hand, at long last? Might as well find out.

Win tickets to USC-Clemson baseball (Sunday game in Columbia)

The Future is Now

At 67, Mainieri doesn’t represent the long-term, down-the-road solution for South Carolina baseball.

He represents the present, the spectacular now.

Mainieri was hired to get the program moving quickly, sooner rather than later, and he embraced those expectations as early as his introductory press conference last summer when he announced, “I didn’t come here to lose.”

This isn’t a rebuilding project. It can’t be.

Mainieri’s track record would suggest it won’t need to be. He’s won more than 1,500 college baseball games and is one of the winningest SEC coaches in conference history. He managed to get Notre Dame – never a college baseball heavyweight – to Omaha. Everywhere he’s been across nearly 40 years of coaching, he’s won.

But he’s closer to 70 than he is to 60. And that means the time is now for embarking on a restoration of a once-proud program.

In many ways, former athletic director Ray Tanner’s hire of Mainieri represented a throwback to the era of Mike McGee as South Carolina’s AD, when McGee made a habit of reeling in brand-name coaches on the backside of their careers who were looking for one last hurrah before riding into the sunset.

Sometimes, the gambit worked, like when Steve Spurrier transformed South Carolina football into a powerhouse and genuine SEC contender. And sometimes, it only kind of worked: Lou Holtz and Dave Odom did some good things with the football and men’s basketball programs, respectively. But they also battled persistent mediocrity before leaving behind unfulfilled hopes.

Tanner’s previous major hires had been the polar opposites of the McGee approach.

He tapped Lamont Paris to lead an SEC men’s basketball program when Paris had only a head coaching gig at Chattanooga to his name. And he entrusted football to Shane Beamer, who had never even been a coordinator before – much less a head coach.

Maybe the Mainieri hire didn’t fit with the pattern we’d seen from Tanner.

But it did tell us this: Fixing South Carolina baseball was paramount, and it needed to happen fast.

Win tickets to USC-Clemson baseball (Sunday game in Columbia)

The Expectation Game

When Holbrook was hired back in 2012, it was met with a near-universal approval rating from South Carolina fans.

He’d been a longtime coach on Tanner’s championship-winning staff, and most of us expected he’d simply keep the trains moving forward until they stopped in Omaha at the end of each season.

That things didn’t work out seemed almost shocking, and by the time it became apparent that Kingston wasn’t the answer for returning the Gamecocks to the top of the SEC, an undeniable pall had spread over the program. There was a sense that we’d lost something and that it had slipped away with disappointing ease.

Mainieri’s hire delivered an energy jolt to this listless vibe, largely rejuvenating a fan base whose spirits had begun to sag in recent years. That’s why many of us were ready to fast-forward through these post-football winter months to get on into spring.

And yet…

The national media isn’t ready to announce South Carolina baseball’s triumphant return. The Gamecocks were left out of every major preseason poll, and if there’s any bubbling excitement surrounding Mainieri’s return to the dugout, it’s coming from Gamecock fans rather than from national observers.

Indeed, the SEC’s coaches predicted South Carolina to finish 14th in the 16-team conference, which would hardly represent a return to past glories.

For now, we’re clinging to those six crucial words Mainieri spoke at his opening press conference.

I didn’t come here to lose.

He’s never lost before, so we don’t have any reason to doubt him now.

Either way, baseball season’s here. It’s time. And we’re ready.

Let’s play ball.

Tell me what you think about the upcoming South Carolina baseball season by writing me at [email protected].

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