Clemson-South Carolina baseball rivalry takes center stage: 'Anything can happen. That’s what makes it so cool.' (2024)

CLEMSON, S.C. — At some point this weekend, Jackie Bradley Jr. will grab his cellphone and trade text messages with several of his former teammates from South Carolina’s baseball team.

The 31-year-old Boston Red Sox center fielder might have a lot on his plate these days between MLB’s lockout and two young children at home, but this is Clemson week. And no matter what’s going on in Bradley’s life every year when South Carolina and Clemson meet on the baseball diamond — as they will again this weekend for their annual rivalry series — he’s tuned in.

“This is something that we always watch,” Bradley told The Athletic this week. “I’m talking to guys like Whit Merrifield, Adrian Morales, all the guys that I played with — Matt Price. We’re all discussing and kind of breaking down the game as we go and kind of just remembering the times when we were there.”

Bradley is no stranger to the Clemson-South Carolina rivalry, having starred for the Gameco*cks from 2009 to 2011. He won the Most Outstanding Player award at the 2010 College World Series — where South Carolina had to go through Clemson for its first of two straight national titles — and has since gone on to play in the biggest rivalry in baseball featuring the Red Sox and New York Yankees.

With Clemson (8-0) and South Carolina (7-1) meeting again this weekend, The Athletic caught up with several of the rivalry’s most memorable figures to share their experiences about what many believe is the premier rivalry in college baseball.

Game 1 is Friday night at South Carolina’s Founders Park, Game 2 is Saturday afternoon at neutral site Segra Park in Columbia and Game 3 is Sunday afternoon at Clemson’s Doug Kingsmore Stadium.

Clemson has won five of the past seven series and leads the overall series 182-143-2 since 1899. But South Carolina’s Andrew Eyster had walk-off hits in back-to-back games a season ago.

“Anything can happen,” former Clemson outfielder Seth Beer said. “That’s what makes it so cool.”

Clemson and South Carolina might not agree on much, but both programs can find common ground in declaring their rivalry as the nation’s best. South Carolina not having any professional teams certainly heightens the intensity at the collegiate level.

Ray Tanner (South Carolina baseball coach from 1997 to 2012, currently South Carolina’s athletic director): I think our rivalry is among the very best, and I know there’s some good ones. You got your Florida-Florida State and others if you will, but I think the Clemson-South Carolina baseball series is one of the very, very best for lots of reasons.

Monte Lee (Clemson baseball coach): This is what you signed up for.

Clate Schmidt (Clemson pitcher from 2013 to 2016): To be honest with you, I think it’s one of the coolest experiences you’ll ever go through as an individual, especially as a collegiate athlete.

Clarke Schmidt (South Carolina pitcher from 2015 to 2017 and Clate Schmidt’s younger brother): There’s a few things that fans will remember you by when you’re playing at South Carolina — and the No. 1 thing is how you played against Clemson throughout your career.

Derick Urquhart (South Carolina outfielder from 1995 to 1998, South Carolina Hall of Fame inductee in 2019): It feels like a June regional weekend.

Landon Powell (South Carolina catcher from 2001 to 2004 and current head coach at North Greenville): I grew up an NC State kid. … I probably wasn’t one of those kids that hated Clemson, because I didn’t grow up in the rivalry. But when I got to South Carolina, it was quickly taught by the upperclassmen: “Hey, we hate these guys. We don’t like Clemson.”

Jack Leggett (Clemson baseball coach, from 1994 to 2015): Always great crowds — and that turned up the intensity even greater.

Tanner: I would sometimes get a little bit deeper in the dugout so (Clemson fans) couldn’t see me.

Beer (Clemson outfielder from 2016 to 2018): For me, it was when we played in Greenville (in 2016) and half the stadium was all Clemson orange and purple and then the other half of the stadium right down the middle at home plate was wearing the black and garnet. That’s when it hit me. … People live and die by this series.

Tanner: We would play that series and then we both went into our conference play, and the intensity is not the same. Although it’s great in the SEC and the ACC, when we got together it was, “This is awesome.”

Mark Kingston (South Carolina coach): (It’s an) exciting week for everybody in South Carolina that loves baseball.

Beer: Dang, man. Those were some fun days. I miss those days.

Clemson has been to the College World Series 12 times. South Carolina, 11. Neither is currently ranked, but both have been in the national spotlight in the past.

Clate Schmidt: There’s been so many ups and downs for both sides.

Leggett: A lot of times you left the field extremely excited because you played well. And there were other times you left and you were hurt. That’s the way it happened.

Tanner: For many, many years we were both ranked.

Leggett: You had two South Carolina teams in Omaha. … That boded really well for the state of South Carolina and the state of South Carolina baseball.

Bradley: Powerhouses, obviously.

Indeed, both teams made it to the College World Series in 1977, 2002 and 2010 with Leggett and Tanner’s teams playing each other in Omaha in 2002 and 2010. Tanner remembers the sense of pride he felt with both of the Palmetto State’s flagship universities making the College World Series at the same time. He also remembers joking about having to travel across the country to play a rival that is normally only about two hours away.

South Carolina won four consecutive elimination games in 2002 — two against Clemson — to make it to the championship game versus Texas.

Powell: Clemson probably had the best team in the country. It was one of those things where I think we knew what a tough matchup it was, going into the game, but we honestly felt like we were playing well right then. We were hot.

Clemson shortstop Khalil Greene had been named the 2002 National Player of the Year by Collegiate Baseball a few weeks before the game, but …

Powell: We feared (Clemson first baseman) Michael Johnson even more. We felt like Michael Johnson was their best hitter.

South Carolina beat Clemson 12-4 in the first game and 10-2 in the second. The Gameco*cks lost to Texas in a winner-take-all national championship game, which still occasionally haunts Powell.

Powell: We still have a little bit of like, “Hey if it was (two out of three), it would have been different.” … But winner take all, we just had no pitching.

In 2010, South Carolina eliminated Clemson again — this time beating Clemson 5-1 and 4-3 en route to the program’s first of two consecutive national championships.

Bradley: I know we came through the losers’ bracket, and we had to play Clemson twice in order to advance to the championship game. So it was a win or go home for us, and there was a lot of talk that we probably wouldn’t be able to beat them two games in order to advance because all they had to do was beat us once.

Tanner: The odds … we were just fortunate that we played well those particular days.

Leggett: Despite the way some of those ended, I was still very proud of our team and very proud of our program.

Tanner: Coach Leggett and I, we really valued the rivalry. We did. We both thought, “This is the way college baseball is supposed to be, with two really good programs going at each other.”

Tanner said there were times he felt like he and Leggett were pitted against one another and acknowledged that the two coaches, in all of their competitiveness, had “a bump or two along the way.”

Tanner: But for the most part, we shook hands, and we waited for the next opportunity. … We were competitive as all get out.

One particularly heated moment between the two teams came March 6, 2011, when Bradley hit a first-inning home run on a cold day at Clemson, and Leggett asked umpires to check Bradley’s bat. Coaches cleared the air a few days later.

Bradley: It was a cold, cooler day … and yeah, obviously we have heaters in the dugout. And I remember hitting a home run and then being accused that we were heating our bats up, almost making them, I guess, too hot or whatever to the point where I got accused of cheating after hitting a home run. That brought about a whole lot of controversy. It was just guys being guys and teams being teams. Just doing petty stuff to egg each other on.

Bradley can’t recall any of his experiences with Clemson getting particularly out of hand, but does remember one game in March 2010 when Clemson beat South Carolina so badly —19-6 — that Tanner banned the uniform combination the Gameco*cks wore that day.

Bradley: We were wearing white hats for that particular game. It might have been white hats and white jerseys. And we got beat so bad that Ray Tanner was like, “All right, that’s it. The white hats go. We’re never wearing them again.” I don’t even know if we ever wore it for the rest of my career. That’s how personal he took that.

But for as competitive as the rivalry has been, that was far from the only lopsided loss — for either team.

Nicky Lomax (Clemson left fielder from 1961 to 1963): In 1962, when we played here at Clemson on an old field where the tennis courts are now, we beat them 27-17.

And in 1997, South Carolina beat Clemson 38-16 — still Clemson’s worst margin of defeat in the history of the series.

Urquhart: It was kind of just a cool, damp night and the wind wasn’t really blowing out. You kind of figured with the weather and not being able to take batting practice on the field, you figured it probably was going to be a pitchers’ duel and a low-scoring game. But in that first inning …

Leggett: I think we scored (five) runs in the first inning, and I’m thinking, “Well, this is gonna be one of those nights for us.”

Tanner: And we scored six in the bottom of the first. And then it became a ridiculous game.

Urquhart: Everything we hit found a hole.

Tanner: My winning pitcher gave up 10 earned runs, I remember. He was the winner. You can’t even explain that game.

Urquhart: We knew at that point we’d be telling our grandkids for the rest of our lives about it.

Tanner: Ball was flying all over the place.

South Carolina might have had a slight edge in the Tanner versus Leggett years, but Clemson enters Friday night having won five of the past seven series. That includes a stretch from 2015 to 2018, during which Clemson won four consecutive.

Lee has a unique perspective of the rivalry, having been a South Carolina assistant from 2003 to 2008. But of all the memories that stand out, Beer’s 2017 heroics are what he seems to remember most vividly.

Beer: I think the one that stands out all the time to me when I think about the series is my sophom*ore year (in 2017). … I hit a game-tying home run to send us to extra innings at their place — with their place absolutely rocking.

Lee: We’re down to our last pitch, and Seth Beer’s at the plate, 3-2 count. He gets a breaking ball out over the plate, hits it out of the ballpark to tie the game, we win the game in extras.

Beer: All the crowd cheering and stuff, I could just feel it just pounding off my chest as I stepped in the box in that situation.

Beer: That is probably, honestly to me, one of the coolest baseball moments of my life.

Indeed, this rivalry seems to bring out the best in both teams from a competitive standpoint. But when the series comes to an end?

Lomax: We were friends.

Clate Schmidt: I mean, I was in (South Carolina first baseman) Ross Grosvenor’s wedding. … I’m super close with a bunch of those guys, like TJ Hopkins.

Beer: Clarke Schmidt, he’s a guy throughout the offseason, we work out together and we joke.

Clarke Schmidt: We see each other every single year and we talk about it day in and day out.

Lee: There’s a lot of just really cool and special moments that I’ve been a part of and I’m very humbled by it and blessed to be a part of this rivalry.

Kingston: Knowing that the whole state really loves to watch it …

Lee: That’s why you come here. You come here to play in front of big crowds in big-time, pressure-packed environments. This is what it’s all about.

(Top photo: David Platt / Courtesy of Clemson Athletics)