Why it took until now to start Gainey, what's next for him and South Carolina pitching staff
Coming off a weekend that was nowhere near successful, there was at least one good thing to happen for South Carolina.
For much of this season, the Gamecocks’ weekend rotation has been a revolving door of new arms coming in and out. There hasn’t been much consistency. But Mark Kingston made a gamble on Saturday and it paid off big time.
After pitching as the team’s closer this year, Garrett Gainey made his first start of the year and gave about everything he could. Facing a red-hot Georgia lineup, the left-hander tossed 5.1 innings of two-run ball and struck out seven with one walk.
“Gainey did his job, that’s exactly what we thought we would get out of him,” Kingston said. “80 pitches was his pitch count because we have to work him up as we get towards regionals so that he’ll be a 100-pitch guy for the regionals.”
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Gainey, a former part-time starter during his at both Winthrop and Liberty, commanded the strike zone as a fastball-first pitcher. Of his 81 pitches, 62 of them were thrown for strikes. He was able to get ahead in a lot of his at-bats and it worked out well for him.
But there is the obvious question: why did it take until now to use him as a starter?
“We had been thinking about it for awhile. And as you know, Matt (Williams) was his pitching coach at Liberty last year. Matt’s opinion was that for now, at least the first half of the season, he liked him better in this role than he did as a starter at Liberty,” Kingston said. “But we got to the point obviously now where it’s a pretty easy decision that we need starters. Now we’ve just got to find the guys that can slam the door shut after he comes out of the game.”
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And that’s the trade-off for moving Gainey from the backend of the bullpen to frontline starter in the weekend rotation. Now that he will all but certainly be starting against vs. No. 1 Tennessee this weekend, South Carolina will have to find a way to bridge the gap to finish off games.
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Kingston had a plan in mind with Chris Veach and Dylan Eskew to pitch after Gainey’s start on Saturday. But that plan didn’t work as Veach gave up a run and Eskew struggled badly. The Gamecocks ended up needing six pitchers to get those 11 outs.
The bullpen isn’t the only issue South Carolina faces right now. Gainey is only one piece of the weekend rotation, who else is going to start games? The obvious answer would be Ty Good and Eli Jones, but both of them had their struggles at times against Georgia.
“The trick is to try to figure out what you’re going to get,” Kingston said. “We’ve got a lot of talented guys, but they’ve given us ups and downs. The trick is trying to figure out which one you’re going to get on any given day. And that’s what makes it harder. When you have more consistency, it’s easier to lay out how the pieces fit together. When there’s inconsistency, it makes it harder. You’ve just got to hope that you make enough good decisions and you get the good rather than the bad.”
