South Carolina baseball‘s SEC Tournament championship dreams crumbled on Saturday in familiar yet chaotic fashion.
Forty-eight hours after LSU beat the No. 10 seed Gamecocks (36-23) with a walkoff, the No. 11 seed Tigers (40-20) defeated the Gamecocks 12-11 in 10 innings in the semifinals at Hoover Metropolitan Stadium in Hoover, Alabama.
South Carolina’s Blake Jackson tried to steal home in the top of the 10th and was originally called out, But the umpires reversed the decision, calling catcher’s interference and a balk, giving the Gamecocks an 11-10 lead.
But in the bottom of the 10th, LSU’s Steven Milam hit a two-run homer, erasing impact of the call that favored South Carolina.
“I don’t know why every time we play LSU, it gets crazier and crazier and crazier, but that seems to be the trend,” South Carolina coach Mark Kingston said. “I wish we came out on top for our fans, for our players. Just not meant to be sometimes, and it wasn’t meant to be for us today.”
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South Carolina baseball allows LSU take late game win again
LSU climbed back into Thursday’s game and capitalized on late game mistakes. The Gamecocks had a 10-9 lead in the ninth but didn’t score any insurance runs to seal the game.
On Saturday, the Tigers were down 10-9 entering the ninth inning just like Thursday and South Carolina allowed one run in the ninth to tie things at 10 before relief pitcher Garrett Gainey struck out three to push things into extra innings.
Jackson’s steal gave South Carolina hope but after the chaos and an 18-minute delay, the Tigers got a two-run home run in the bottom of the 10th to take the comeback win.
South Carolina used five different pitchers on Saturday, including Sam Simpson, who hadn’t pitched since March. Gainey took the loss.
South Carolina baseball leads 8-0, then crumbles in fourth inning vs. LSU
Dalton Reeves’ three-run home run made it 4-0 Gamecocks in the third. Will Tippet scored on Jackson’s single before Cole Messina added his 15th RBI of the tournament to make it 6-0 in the fourth. Parker Noland’s two-run single made it 8-0 South Carolina.
Fielding mistakes and pitching fatigue quickly made it an 8-6 game to close the fourth. After Roman Kimball allowed two runs and five hits in three innings, Drake Quinn came on in relief with the bases loaded. Quinn walked one and gave up a two-run single and was shortly replaced by Eli Jones with an 8-4 score.
South Carolina missed two balls that could have ended the inning but instead, fielding mistakes by Talmadge LeCroy and Kennedy Jones let the Tigers get within two.
South Carolina baseball’s SEC tournament run comes to a close
The Tigers won a day off with Thursday’s victory, and Saturday marked the fifth straight game for the Gamecocks. South Carolina hasn’t been in the SEC championship since 2004, when the Gamecocks won their only SEC title.
The Gamecocks entered the tournament with six straight losses, looking to erase back-to-back sweeps from Georgia and Tennessee. The last time South Carolina advanced to the semifinals was 2017. Last year, the Gamecocks lost in the loser’s bracket.
The Gamecocks will find out their NCAA tournament fate on Monday during the selection show (noon, ESPN). It’s likely South Carolina will be as high as the No. 2 seed in a regional.
“Obviously if anybody didn’t believe we were capable of that before this week, I think we passed the eye test. We’re one of the best teams in the country,” Kingston said. “It’s hard to think that you can have significant growth on a team this late in the season, but we did. We did, because there were so many different challenging situations that (we can) learn from.”
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Lulu Kesin covers South Carolina athletics for The Greenville News and the USA TODAY Network. Email her at lkesin@gannett.com and follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @Lulukesin
