College of Charleston bests Chanticleers again

When Coastal Carolina and College of Charleston met on the field last week, both were climbing the national rankings and positioned as the two best college baseball teams in the state.

Eight days later, the Cougars are still surging and the Chanticleers, well, it hasn’t been a good week for the Chants.

The No. 20-ranked Cougars won the rematch with Coastal Carolina, 8-5, Wednesday at Patriots Point to sweep the season series from the Chants, who dropped out of the Baseball America top-25 poll this week and have now dropped four of their last five games.

“They played better than we did both games and tip your hat to them,” Coastal Carolina coach Gary Gilmore said. “They’re very good, they’re an experienced offensive team and they’re better than we are right now.”

Junior right-hander Tyler Poole made his first start of the season for the Chants – who are still ranked No. 24 in the D1Baseball.com poll and No. 25 by the National College Baseball Writers Association – as the coaches juggled the pitching staff with sophomore ace Alex Cunningham expected to be unavailable this week due to an arm injury that Gilmore said he did not have all the details on aside it from it being related to the elbow or triceps.

Poole, who came in with a 3.68 earned-run average despite 24 walks in 22 innings of relief this season, didn’t make it out of the third inning while continuing to struggle with his control. He gave up five hits, four walks and four earned runs in 2 2/3 innings to drop to 1-1.

Coastal Carolina (27-13) had taken a 1-0 lead in the top of the third inning when junior Tyler Chadwick led off with a double and junior Anthony Marks drove him home with an RBI single two batters later.

But College of Charleston (29-9) scored the next seven runs to seize full control of the game.

Poole erased a leadoff single in the bottom of the third by getting Erven Roper to ground into a double play, but the Cougars proceeded to launch a two-out rally – with plenty of help – that would swing the game in their favor. Champ Rowland reached on an infield single and stole second and Poole then walked the next three batters while plating the first run to tie the game. Nick Pappas followed with a two-run single to right and Morgan Phillips delivered an RBI single up the middle to make it 4-1.

After Poole walked the next batter, Bradley Jones, he was pulled from the game in favor of junior lefty Brock Hunter.

In the fourth inning, Hunter was removed after a issuing a one-out walk and senior righty Tom Durkin gave up a two-run homer to the first batter he faced, Alex Pastorius, to make it a 6-1 game.

Rowland made it 7-1 in the fifth with a two-out RBI double and Pappas crushed a solo home run in the seventh off freshman righty Zack Hopeck for an 8-2 Cougars lead.

Coastal Carolina showed some fight in the eighth inning when junior Casey Schroeder slugged a three-run home run to right to make it an 8-5 game. It was his ninth homer of the season to tie junior David Parrett for the team lead.

Parrett and Chadwick followed that blast with back-to-back walks, but the threat ended quickly as freshman Al Molina struck out and Marks popped out to third to end the inning.

“We’re not putting everything together right now,” Schroeder said. “We’ve kind of been hit and miss in a lot of different areas. I mean, we’ve been walking some guys, getting into trouble, falling behind in counts and it’s hard to play that way. That’s why we’ve been giving up some runs.

“Offensively we got some hits today, but we didn’t really string a bunch together in a row. That’s just what’s going on. We’ve got to clean up our defense, make good pitches and get ahead on batters and line some hits up. It’s baseball. The good thing about it is we get to come back this weekend and play three more.”

Pappas was 2-for-4 with three RBIs to lead the Cougars, who beat Coastal Carolina 8-3 last Tuesday and have now won 19 of their last 22 games. Phillips was 3-for-4 with a run scored and an RBI and Roper was 3-for-4 as well.

Nathan Helvey (6-3) earned the win, giving up five hits, two walks and one run over six innings.

For the Chants, Chadwick finished 2-for-3 with a run, junior Zach Remillard was 2-for-3 and Schroeder was 1-for-3 with that three-run homer. The team went through five pitches in the loss.

Coastal Carolina will look to bounce back with a three-game Big South series at Presbyterian, starting Friday.

“Absolutely it concerns me every single day,” Gilmore said of the team’s recent struggles. “But I can’t fix some of the things overnight. So we’re working at it and somewhere along the way hopefully we get better like we were at one point in time. We’re not that same team right now.”

This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 10:52 PM with the headline "College of Charleston bests Chanticleers again."