What we know about Coastal Carolina baseball after its opening weekend, win over WVU
Coastal Carolina baseball coach Gary Gilmore is still piecing together his lineup following the season-opening Baseball at the Beach tournament at Springs Brooks Stadium.
And that might continue for a while, considering the multitude of pieces he has that can all be viable options.
Gilmore believes an influx of 12 experienced transfers and six freshmen added to some talented returning players has expanded CCU’s possibilities this season.
“There’s probably two, three, maybe four position players right now who have kind of cemented themselves either because they had really good years last year or went off in the summer and did something exceptional, like Eric Brown,” Gilmore said. “ . . . Outside of two or three of those guys, I feel everything else is mix and match. I plan on playing a lot of guys and giving people opportunities to play.
“[But] if you play like an All-American and have All-American numbers, you don’t come out.”
The Chanticleers went 3-1 in the tournament, including their 9-7 win Monday over West Virginia in a Presidents Day matinee.
They displayed ample offense and depth both at the plate and on the mound, though the early-season defense was porous at times.
“We’ve got a chance to be good. There’s a long way to go,” said Gilmore, who was on the bench for the final three games of the tournament after missing Friday’s opener following a medical procedure on Tuesday. “I’m very pleased in the overall performance. . . . Let’s just hope we can continue to build. It was a great thing to see a handful of guys who just needed some confidence play well this weekend and be able to walk out of the first four games and feel really good about themselves.”
Both new and returning players excelled at the plate over the weekend.
CCU depth and versatility
The Chants batted .360 as a team and had seven players who hit at least .333 in the tournament, led by third baseman Cooper Weiss at .571 in three games and senior William & Mary transfer Matt McDermott at .500 in four games. CCU batted .257 in a down year for the program last season, when the team went 27-24 overall and 9-12 in the Sun Belt Conference.
Centerfielder Austin White, a super senior transfer from Rhode Island, appears to be entrenched at the leadoff spot and reached base 10 times over the weekend via hit or walk, going 7-for-17 with three walks for a .412 batting average.
He added seven RBIs at the top of the order, and knocked in the game-winning runs Monday with a two-run line-drive single up the middle in the bottom of the eighth inning with the game tied at 7, the bases loaded and one out.
Last season at Rhode Island, White batted .326 and led the team in hits (61), walks (32), stolen bases (16) and on-base percentage (.434).
“I think that young man will be one of the better leadoff hitters we’ve had here in my tenure here,” Gilmore said. “I don’t want to raise the bar so high that he can’t achieve it, but he has a fantastic eye at the plate, he’s a really tough dude to strike out. He tends to want to get a little handsy with his hitting but when he stays nice and tight he’s really a good hitter. . . . He kind of makes us go. You turn that lineup over at the bottom and if you get some guys on base he can be a good RBI guy.”
Junior infielder and designated hitter Dale Thomas had five doubles among his eight hits in 18 at-bats (.444 batting average) and knocked in five runs in four starts.
Junior Nick Lucky, who is batting .333, Northern Colorado senior transfer Jake Gitter and Utah senior transfer Christopher Rowan Jr. hit home runs in the tournament for CCU. Preseason Sun Belt Conference Player of the Year Eric Brown, a junior shortstop, is batting .417 and outfielder Tyler Johnson is batting .364.
“There’s just a lot of depth with everybody,” Thomas said. “You could put out the nine starters out there, and the next day you can go with a completely different lineup and not miss a beat. . . . It doesn’t really put pressure on us because it’s a team game, it’s a team sport. we want everyone to do good no matter what because the ultimate goal at the end of the day is winning. We have a great group of guys and that’s what we care about most is winning, and we support each other.”
In addition to depth the Chants also have versatility. Thomas and Weiss have played multiple infield positions, McDermott at second base has formerly played shortstop., and Gilmore said several outfielders can play all three outfield positions.
“We have some ability to do some things,” Gilmore said. “We’ve not had a lot of that in my time here. Our great teams have been great teams but we’ve always been an injury away from really creating issues. This team has some depth and it has some ability to maneuver around things, where guys can play multiple positions.”
Pitching in
Coastal may have something special in starting pitcher Michael Knorr.
The big graduate transfer from Cal State Fullerton struck out a career-high 10 batters in 6 1/3 innings, hitting 98 mph on the radar gun with his fastball on multiple occasions. Knorr, a 6-foot, 245-pound California native, allowed three hits and one unearned run after a first-inning strikeout victim reached base on a passed ball and scored.
The 10 strikeouts were the most by a CCU pitcher since Zach McCambley fanned 10 against St. Joseph’s on Feb. 21, 2020.
“He continues to evolve and get better,” Gilmore said. “. . . I see that kind of velocity out of him and at times a hair better almost every time out, and he’s really starting to learn to command the ball. His breaking ball is starting to come around where it’s not a spinner, it’s starting to create depth. If he can get to a point where he has those two and an occasional changeup, that 95- to 98-mile-an-hour fastball gets on you in a hurry.”
Coastal generally got solid outings from each of its starters — Knorr, Nick Parker, Reid VanScoter and Monday’s starter Elliot Carney, the 2021 Southern Conference Pitcher of the Year at Wofford — as none allowed more than three earned runs and threw at least 4 1/3 innings.
“A bunch of guys went out there this weekend and threw 90 to 94, and I’m proud of all of them,” Gilmore said.
Sophomore righthander Teddy Sharkey recorded a pair of saves, including one Monday, striking out five in 2 1/3 innings over his two outings and allowing just one hit but four walks.
“He’s a guy who relishes that [closer] position,” Gilmore said of Sharkey. “His biggest challenge, and we talk about it all the time, is limiting the amount of walks and things that he has. It’s not a velocity issue. He’s 93 to 95 [mph] and he’ll throw his breaking ball over the plate, we just have to fill the [strike] zone up.”
The Chants had 12 errors in the four games, including five by Brown at shortstop, which led to 10 unearned runs among the 21 allowed by the pitching staff.
“I had no idea as a group we would pitch as well as we did. I thought those guys did a fantastic job all weekend,” Gilmore said. “I thought we would be a highly, incredibly good defensive team and I thought we would be one of the better base-running teams, and this weekend we shot ourselves in the foot many a time in both of those areas. Our short game is nonexistent.
“We’ll have a couple days to do some work on that and hopefully we’ll be better this next weekend. All of it is about getting better each weekend but still finding ways to win.”
West Virginia fell to 3-1 Monday after outscoring its first three opponents — Kent State once and Central Michigan twice — by a combined 31-11.
The Mountaineers took an early 4-2 lead on the strength of a three-run homer in the first inning by freshman first baseman Grant Hussey, and the Chants took a 7-4 lead with five runs combined in the fourth and fifth innings before WVU tied the game with two in the sixth and one in the seventh.
The Chants host the Carolinas Coastline Classic featuring Illinois, Rutgers, Ball State and Middle Tennessee State from Friday through Monday before hosting UNC W’ilmington at 4 p.m. next Wednesday.
“We’re not where we need to be but it’s nice to have the interchangeable parts and the ability to continue to get better,” Gilmore said. “We’re just beginning to scratch the surface. We’re an eight-cylinder car and we’re hitting on about four. If we get to a point somewhere along the way that we’re hitting on eight, we’re going to be a handful.”
Gilmore recovering from surgery
Gilmore had surgery last Tuesday at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston as part of his ongoing battle with pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.
Gilmore has been receiving treatment for nearly two years for the cancer, which is not operable or curable at this time, but can be managed for many years.
“As of January my cancer has gone 14 months of completely stable to even slight remission in the actual cancer part,” Gilmore said.
But a complication developed recently when the cancerous tumor grew outside the pancreas and wrapped around an artery, Gilmore said, so the artery was moved around the tumor.
“They were really worried that it was increasing the blood pressure in that artery, and because it had deteriorated some because the tumor was wrapped around it, I was a huge bleed risk,” Gilmore explained. “That thing could rupture and before they could get me to a hospital and take care of me my life would be at risk.”
As part of the procedure Tuesday, doctors also embolized his spleen to allow half of it to deteriorate while the other half functions.
“They basically went in and stopped up the arteries and things to half of my spleen and it just basically is dying off,” Gilmore said. “That will help regulate my spleen. It had enlarged considerably and it was causing me other issues.”
Gilmore will have to endure pain from his spleen for the next few weeks, and had a particularly rough night on Sunday.
“It’s just very painful for two or three weeks,” he said. “. . . It doesn’t just die in a second. It takes awhile. So I’m real sore to the touch on my side and back. Every way I turn if I stand or sit or whatever, I get excited in a game and it’s like there’s a knife in my side. But those three wins make it all feel better, I promise you.”
Gilmore said he was “negotiating” the scheduling of the procedure and his primary doctor said a team of three physicians was available to perform the surgery last week at MD Anderson.
“I said I’ll be there. Let’s go,” Gilmore said. “Because we’ve got a chance to have a good [season] this time and I want to be here for all of it, but I sure as hell want to be here at the end.”
This story was originally published February 21, 2022 at 8:15 PM.
