I was able to get out to Carolina Stadium today and watch my first Gamecock baseball game of the season. I have been out of the country for 3 weeks before that. I did get to see the final game of the Carolina-Clemson series on TV.  The Gamecocks went down in defeat today (8-3) against a pretty good CSUB team.

The starting pitchers for CSUB all pitched over a 100 innings a piece this weekend. Don’t know that I have ever seen or heard of 3 pitchers in a row throwing over 100 pitches. The CSUB club came in ranked around 30th in the nation and I can see why.  Their starting pitchers all seem to be pretty good. The starter today Tommy Hoenshell (3-2) was hit pretty hard a few times but most were hit straight at somebody. There were 3 or 4 drives to the warning track but most were just long outs. He made the pitches when he had to and the Gamecocks could never get to him.

The season is still young but I noticed several starters for USC have low .200 batting averages. I hope as the days warm up the bats heat up also. Several of the balls hit today would probably have been home runs last year but with the changes to the bats they were just long outs. In Saturdays game Carolina was able to play small ball and win by a 5-2 margin.

Overall the Gamecock baseball team would have loved to have won all 3 but taking 2 out of 3 from a pretty good ballclub is alright. CSUB has several pro prospects and with their starting pitching they should be in post season play this year.

This upcoming week will be a big week for the Gamecocks as they play Furman, Wofford and then start a 3 game series with Georgia to start SEC play. This will be a good week to take a look at some of the young pitchers.