East Carolina forces deciding game with USC

GREENVILLE, N.C. — East Carolina’s first NCAA regional tournament at its home ballpark will last a little longer.
The Pirates held off South Carolina’s late rally to beat the Gamecocks 8-6 Sunday night and force a winner-take-all championship game.
Brandon Henderson hit a grand slam, Kyle Roller added a three-run shot and Dustin Harrington also connected for the top-seeded Pirates (45-18). They scored the first eight runs and made them stand, winning their second elimination game of the day and setting up tonight’s rematch.
“I told our guys just to believe. I told them today that we didn’t have to win, in Game 1, three games. We just had to win one,” East Carolina coach Billy Godwin said. “And then when we got one game won, I said, ‘We’ve just got to win one.’ Now we’re sitting here with one game to go, and we’ve got to win one.”
South Carolina (40-22) trailed 8-2 entering the ninth before Justin Dalles got things started with a two-run homer and pinch-hitter Brady Thomas’ bases-loaded double brought home two more.
Reliever Seth Simmons then got two flyouts to wrap up the victory.
“We put some pressure on them and came back, but just weren’t able to get one more hit to tie it,” South Carolina coach Ray Tanner said.
Henderson seemingly broke this one open with his seventh-inning blast. The towering drive hugged the left-field line, chased starter Nolan Belcher and made it 8-0.
Turns out the Pirates needed every single one of those runs to seal the victory for freshman Kevin Brandt (9-1). The crafty reliever, who was making just his fifth start, didn’t allow a baserunner to reach third until the seventh and retired 11 consecutive hitters before Bobby Haney singled to lead off the sixth.
Belcher (4-5) allowed eight runs on nine hits in 6 1-3 innings for South Carolina, which is looking for its third berth in the super regionals in four years and eighth since 2000.
“We’re upbeat — we’ve got another game,” said third baseman Andrew Crisp, who drove in the Gamecocks’ first two runs.
For East Carolina, clawing through the losers’ bracket is rarely the formula for success in this double-elimination tournament. The Pirates are playing host to a Greenville-based regional for the first time — though they have hosted before in nearby Wilson and Kinston — and made up for the 12-2 loss a day earlier to South Carolina that put them on their challenging path.
“We came out and played very loose today. After last night’s game, we just turned it around,” Henderson said, adding that Roller’s homer “really helped us out, because we were tired. We were dead. But that pumped us up, pumped the crowd up.”
Roller picked up where he left off a few hours earlier in the first of East Carolina’s two elimination games of the day.
After connecting twice in the fifth inning in a 16-9 win against Binghamton, Roller gave the Pirates an early 3-0 lead by driving the first pitch he saw from Belcher over the wall in right-center for his team-leading 16th homer of the season.
Harrington put the Pirates up 4-0 by leading off the fourth with an opposite-field shot down the right-field line.
Both teams turned in highlight-reel defensive plays to take away home runs. South Carolina center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr. lunged over the fence to rob Jared Avchen of a homer in the second, and Pirates right fielder Devin Harris returned the favor in the fifth by leaping to swipe a homer from Adam Matthews.