Baseball thoughts

Such an oddly subdued vibe for so much of yesterday's baseball game, you could've made a case for renaming it Doug Kingsmorgue Stadium.

The whipping winds made it a bitterly cold day, but it went beyond that. Clemson's habit for leaving runners on base (16 for the game) restricted momentum and excitement, but it went beyond that.

Everything in these parts is magnified when this rivalry shifts in the Gamecocks' favor, and Clemson fans awoke Sunday morning knowing their team had lost 16 of its previous 22 games against the feathered foes from Columbia. And those back-to-back College World Series crowns? Like a kick in the teeth on top of the head-to-head futility.

For so many years, Clemson fans derived more relief than joy out of beating South Carolina. That's the way it works when you dominate your rival, and that goes a long way toward explaining the new and haunting feeling of the tables being turned in recent years.

A Clemson loss yesterday wouldn't necessarily have translated into a bad season, and a win yesterday doesn't automatically mean a great year. The baseball season is way too long to make those kinds of lasting judgments.

But it was a big win, both for the team and for the fan base. There can be no doubt about that, because being swept away by the Gamecocks could've inflicted a pretty severe psychological blow on top of the damage already done.

One of the more poignant sequences yesterday was the contrast in immediate reactions to the win, sealed when Steve Wilkerson brought Jon McGibbon home from second with a liner to left center.

Clemson's players erupted in an exuberant celebration that spilled into right field. Over near third base, Jack Leggett was quite subdued.

Both reactions were perfectly understandable. The players experienced a release after all that frustration from this game and from this weekend. The coach knew winning one of three isn't up to traditional standards and isn't near enough to quell the uneasiness and angst that's come as a result of the Gamecocks' recent dominance and prominence.

The Tigers are 5-4, and that's not what people expected nine games in. The same Maine team that gave Clemson fits last weekend suffered three losses at Florida State by a combined score of 34-2. The ACC is going to be an absolute bear this season, starting with this weekend's visit from Top 10 North Carolina.

But the importance of yesterday's win is put into proper context when you envision the fallout of a loss. The Tigers avoided that ugliness from rallying from a 4-0 deficit early, and then rallying from two runs down when the Gamecocks needed six outs to whip out the brooms.

Clemson can look back on this series and know that it came close to taking the series. The Tigers were blown off the field Saturday in Columbia, but they came tantalizingly close to taking Friday's opener in Charleston.

This team isn't blessed with a bunch of talent, particularly on offense. But this team showed some fight yesterday, and that's a positive even if the overall narrative of the weekend -- and of the rivalry itself -- continued to be a negative.

LW