Andrew Beckwith in 2013 action as a Blythewood High School senior. In Omaha, he’s hit his stride.
OMAHA, NEB. (June 29, 2016) – The legend of Andrew Beckwith and this Coastal Carolina baseball team just keeps growing.
Five days after allowing one run in a complete-game win over top-seeded Florida, Beckwith somehow matched that feat Friday night as the Chanticleers did it again, fighting off elimination in the College World Series once more to keep their historic season going with a 4-1 win over TCU before a crowd of 24,904 at TD Ameritrade Park.
The junior right-hander battled through a career-high 137 pitches – 101 of those strikes – in yet another dominant performance on college baseball’s biggest stage. He has incredibly thrown 18 innings while allowing only two runs and one walk this week against the best competition in the country.
Beckwith’s latest gem put the Chants one win away from reaching the best-of-three championship series, a game they iced Saturday 7-5 over TCU.
“I mean, the first one on that stage against the No. 1 team in the country, that had to be the top pitching performance probably ever at our university, and then he comes back on four complete days rest and turns around and does this,” Chants coach Gary Gilmore said. “It’s the most incredible thing I’ve been around.”
There’s no way to overstate this, no shortage of adjectives to apply at this point. This last week, this program-transforming experience and all it’s entailed has simply been a dream from which the Chants refuse to awake.
And one nobody associated with Coastal Carolina will ever forget – especially Beckwith.
He broke the program record for wins in a season and took the outright NCAA Division I lead in that category while improving to 14-1 as he held the Horned Frogs – who had scored 11 runs over their first two games of the week – to just six hits and a walk with five strikeouts in his second career complete-game and second of the week.
Beckwith is the first pitcher to throw two complete games in the College World Series since Arizona’s Konner Wade in 2012.
“It’s unbelievable. I never dreamt of this coming true. I never thought it could ever happen,” he said afterward. “I actually have no idea how many times it has happened because I haven’t looked [it] up … but I really can’t believe it. I’m sure I’ll sleep easy tonight.”
Beckwith might not have lasted the whole game – or been allowed to – if he hadn’t made it look so smooth and easy.
He retired 13 straight batters at one point while making an early 2-0 lead stand, and it’s safe to say he now has a place reserved in Coastal Carolina history and perhaps College World Series history.
For a guy who went overlooked by big league talent evaluators on a team that produced six Major League draft picks earlier this month, nobody has seized this spotlight quite like Beckwith. For a guy who started the season as a middle reliever – albeit an incredibly valuable one – this narrative is nothing anybody could have thought to script.
He worked around a couple early jams Friday before turning nearly unhittable.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: At press time, Beckwith’s next likely appearance was June 29, after The Voice went to press. Coastal fell to Arizona in game 1 of the title series, 3-0, but held off Arizona 5-4 Tuesday night to force the deciding game.
Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/sports/college/big-south/coastal-carolina-university/article85925517.html#storylink=cpy
