Baseball Weekend Wrap Up

The South Carolina pitching staff, led by a strong bullpen, propelled the Gamecocks through a three game sweep of the Eastern Michigan Eagles over the weekend.

In arguably their best showing of the year, the bullpen threw nine innings over the weekend, giving up no runs and only five hits.

Harris Honeycutt and Mike Cisco earned wins as starters, each with nine strikeouts and one walk. On Saturday, Jordan Costner got his first career win thanks to a walk off grand slam by Phil Disher. Jay Brown went 4 1/3 innings but didn’t suffer a loss.

Freshmen Blake Cooper and Nick Fuller did mop-up duty on Friday, each throwing an inning. In game three, Curtis Johnson and Wynn Pelzer wrapped up the win for Mike Cisco.

Once again Will Atwood gave another solid performance out of the pen, going three innings in game two allowing the Gamecocks to stay alive.

The bats, however, were a different story. The Gamecocks have counted on great hitting so far this year, but they cooled off just a little bit against the Eagles. Cheyne Hurst led the Gamecocks with three hits on Friday in his first start and had the first two RBI's. Hurst moved to the leadoff spot for both games on Saturday and had one hit in each game.

Travis Jones, who held that spot for the first seven games, moved to the eighth spot in the lineup on Saturday. Jones hit safely in all three games and expect him to move back there shortly. The junior college transfer is now hitting .324 with a .435 on-base percentage.

Lonnie Chisenhall’s hitting streak came to an end Saturday in game three. Chisenhall had two hits in the first two games, but went 0-4 Saturday night. His average is still an incredible .405 heading into the Clemson weekend, and he is only expected to get better as the year goes on.

The bats saved the Gamecocks in game two, thanks to Disher’s walk off grand slam. Trailing 5-2 in the ninth inning, the Gamecocks scored six runs for their first late comeback of the year. Disher leads the team with a .424 average and 13 RBI's.

Drew Martin got his second start of the year in game two and hit his second homer of the year.

The Gamecocks did have a total of 28 hits over the weekend, but the overall consistency wasn’t there for nine innings. While the Gamecock bats haven’t gone cold, next weekend’s series against #2 ranked Clemson will be a real challenge.

The Gamecocks went into the Eastern Michigan series not completely healthy and came out the same way. Robbie Grinestaff didn’t play this past weekend, and Andrew Crisp injured his wrist, but Coach Tanner believes he’ll be ready for Clemson on Saturday.

South Carolina is 8-1 on the year, and this weekend’s series against the Tigers promises to be a showdown between two of the best team’s in the country.