Tag: USC Baseball

USC two-sport star Duce Robinson gets a double for his first collegiate hit

Duce naturally got a double as his first hit as a USC Trojan. Poetry.

Duce Robinson, at 6-5 and 225 pounds from Phoenix, is getting his first action on the USC baseball diamond. Trojan fans know Duce Robinson as the highly-touted freshman receiver on the football team, but he came to USC as a two-sport athlete, football and baseball.

Robinson had 16 catches for 335 yards and two touchdowns in the 2023 football season. Recruiting services had him as a top tight end coming out of high school, but Lincoln Riley made it clear that he will be a receiver for the Trojans.

Duce made it clear that he wanted to continue his baseball career at USC. There was a time last spring when it was uncertain if Robinson would play pro baseball instead of joining the Trojan football team.  He didn’t reach a high-enough draft status, however, to focus solely on baseball and cash in on the opportunity of pursuing an MLB dream just yet. He wanted to keep both fires burning in football and baseball. After completing his first USC football season, he has turned the page to baseball.

Robinson’s power, size and raw athleticism give him enormous potential. We will see how much Robinson can grow as he tries to reach the ceiling of the sum total of his abilities. We all got a first glimpse of that potential on Sunday in Arlington, Texas. Robinson got his first college baseball hit for USC against TCU.

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USC sophomore catcher Jacob Galloway’s hot start carries Trojans’ bats in 2024

Jacob Galloway has been a bright spot in a difficult time for USC baseball.

Jacob Galloway, the 5-9, 175-pound sophomore catcher from Camarillo, California, has had a hit in every USC baseball game this year except the season opener against BYU.  He hopes to continue his success from last season. Last year, he appeared in 24 games and started 19 of them. He led the 2023 Trojans in batting with a .365 average.  USC needs his bat to stay hot as the team navigates a rough start to the 2024 campaign. The Trojans are 1-5 to start the year through Saturday, February 24.

Much of the Trojans’ struggles, which have kept them from winning consistently, have come at the plate. Of the players with at least two plate appearances per game, only two Trojans have an OPS north of .600 and a batting average above .250. J.T. Walton is hitting .500, but he only has eight at-bats on the season, so the only everyday starter who has been reliable at the plate has been Galloway.

Jacob has started every game for USC this season at catcher and is batting .400 with a SLG% of.800 and an OPS of 1.280. In the third game of the season, he went 3-4 with two doubles and a run scored. This effort was squandered as the rest of the team mustered only two hits in a loss to Ohio State. The Trojans ended a five-game losing streak with a win over the Portland Pilots on the back of Galloway’s 3-RBI night.

The Trojans will rely on Galloway’s consistency since he first stepped on Dedeaux Field last year. They will try to wake up their bats, which have been hovering around or below the Mendoza Line (.200) all season.

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Tyler Stromsborg’s pitching and Ethan Hedges’ walk-off double get USC baseball its first win in 2024

USC baseball is no longer winless. Let’s see if the boys can get on a winning streak.

USC baseball finally got into the 2024 win column with a 6-5 victory over the Portland Pilots.  

After a surprising turnaround by USC in 2023 under first-year head coach Andy Stankiewicz, the Trojans were voted fifth in the Pac-12 Preseason Coaches Poll. However the season has gotten off to a rocky start. The Men of Troy were swept in the MLB Desert Invitational in Arizona. They then lost to Loyola Marymount and dropped the first game of a three-game series to the Pilots to start the year 0-5.

USC finally broke through on Saturday. Starting pitcher Tyler Stromsborg had a remarkable performance through the first six innings, keeping the game scoreless. Stromsborg was highly efficient on the mound, facing only 22 hitters during those innings he limited the Pilots to only four hits. However, a walk and a single ended the day for Stromsborg. USC had a 5-0 lead. The bullpen for the Trojans did them no favors, allowing the Pilots to rally for four runs with USC clinging to a one run lead, 5-4. 

In the eighth inning, Portland’s red-hot designated hitter, Brady Bean, who ended the day 3-3, started the inning off Josh Blum with a home run to tie the game at 5-5. Blum had a rough inning, hitting a batter and throwing a wild pitch, but got out of the inning without allowing the go-ahead run.

Jared Feikes retired the side for the Trojans in the top of the ninth. In the bottom of the ninth, Trojan hitters Bryce Grudzielanek and Carson Wells both singed. The sophomore third baseman from Mater Dei High School, Ethan Hedges, smacked a double off the left-center field fence with two outs to score the walk-off game winner and get that monkey off the 2024 Trojans’ backs.

The Trojans will try to take the series with a win today at Great Park in Irvine, California.  The game starts at 1 p.m., and you can watch the live stream by clicking here.

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Rod Dedeaux set a national championship standard USC wants to regain

Here’s a reminder of where USC wants to eventually return one day.

The USC Trojans had a bad opening weekend for their 2024 college baseball season. The Trojans were unable to win a game at the three-game Desert Invitational. USC lost to BYU, Grand Canyon, and Ohio State in three individual contests. It was not the start the Trojans wanted. Yet, it’s only one weekend. One would think this team will eventually find a rhythm at the plate. The bats will get hot and the pitching will be there to enable the offensive production to stand up. USC wants to reach a top standard, a benchmark for success established by iconic USC baseball coach Rod Dedeaux.

When you think about national championships at USC, you think about John McKay and Pete Carroll in football, and you think about Rod Dedeaux in baseball.

The facts are simple, yet so powerful in that simplicity. Dedeaux won 11 national championships at USC, and he won five consecutive crowns from 1970 through 1974. Just for perspective, the second most successful college baseball program of all time, LSU, has seven national titles. USC and Dedeaux won five titles in a five-year span. That’s insane.

USC matched LSU’s seven national titles in an 11-year span from 1968 through 1978. USC’s baseball dynasty was every bit as overwhelming as UCLA’s basketball dynasty under John Wooden in the same time period (the early 1960s through the late 1970s).

This is the standard USC aspires to. Today’s Trojans have a lot of work to do.

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USC baseball star Austin Overn is ready to justify his All-America status

Austin Overn tries to live up to the hype and translate personal success into an NCAA Tournament berth for USC.

Tustin, California, native and USC sophomore Austin Overn was recently named to the college baseball Preseason All-American Team. The USC captain is the best position player on the Trojans’ roster and the expected catalyst for an offense which needs to be able to help the Men of Troy’s strong pitching rotation in 2024.

Austin Overn started 58 games for a USC team on the rise. He was a freshman All-American who led the nation in triples.

Overn hit .314 with a .530 slugging percentage and a .402 on-base percentage. He also set a new single-season USC record for triples with 14, breaking the previous USC record of 10 set by Grant Green in 2008. At the end of the 2023 season, he was named a freshman All-American, an All-Pac-12 selection and a Pac-12 All-Defensive Team selection.

Overn will be eligible to declare for the MLB draft this summer. He hopes to impress scouts by backing up his freshman statistics with a stellar sophomore campaign. He will also try to carry USC to the NCAA Tournament, which the Trojans just missed in 2023.

The Trojans struggled last year when they weren’t playing at home. They posted an 8-17-1 record in road and neutral-site games, while going 26-6 at home. With Dedeaux Field under construction this season, USC will divide its home games across three stadiums in Southern California.

Overn and the Trojans return to the field on February 16 when they take on the BYU Cougars in their season opener in Arizona as part of the MLB Desert Invitational.

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USC baseball opens its season February 16 with three preseason All-Pac-12 honorees

USC baseball starts in one week! The Trojans and their fans are excited!

USC baseball opens its season next week at the MLB Desert Invitational against Brigham Young University, Grand Canyon and Ohio State.  Last year the Trojans were 34-22-1 in Andy Stankiewicz’s first season as the skipper at Troy.  The Pac-12 poll for the 2023 season had USC picked to finish 10th, just ahead of last-place Utah (Colorado discontinued baseball in 1980). This year, the media voted the Trojans No. 5 behind (1) Oregon State, (2) Stanford, (3) UCLA, and (4) Oregon.

The Trojans are led by three All-Pac-12 selections: Caden Aoki, Austin Overn, and Josh Blum.

Aoki is a junior right-handed pitcher from Huntington Beach, California.  He was an all-conference selection in 2023, when he had a Pac-12 leading ERA of 2.98 and an impressive career 1.25 WHIP. Caden signed with Notre Dame out of high school and transfered to USC for his sophomore year.

Blum is a junior right-handed hurler from Bellaire, Texas. He posted a 3.34 ERA with 40 strikeouts in 32 innings pitched and 30 appearances out of the bullpen. He had a dominant stretch in which he held opponents scoreless over seven appearances that combined for 11 innings.

Overn is an electric outfielder from Tustin, California. In 2023 he was a Freshman All-American and an All-Pac-12 selection in his first year at USC.  He set the USC single season triples record with 14 and finished seventh in the league with 16 stolen bases. When he wasn’t ripping up the base paths, his speed and athleticism allowed him to rob many hitters of extra-base hits, leading to Pac-12 All-Defensive Team recognition.

Aoki, Blum, Overn, and the 2024 squad would like to get off to a faster start than they did last year. USC stumbled out of the gate in 2023, going 5-7-1 in its first 13 games. A five-game losing streak in the middle of the season allowed the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee to snub a Trojan team that won 17 games in the conference. The 2024 season starts next Friday, Feb. 16, against BYU at 4 p.m. Pacific time on MLB.TV.

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USC baseball season is just around the corner, and the Trojans have a lot to prove

It’s a huge season for USC baseball. The start of the journey is not too far away.

It’s an exciting time for USC baseball, and also a pressure-filled moment for the program. USC is widely seen as a much-improved program under head coach Andy Stankiewicz. The Trojans are supposed to be good this season as they try to return to national prominence.

The pressure of the 2024 season is attached to the reality that USC was unfairly snubbed for the 2023 NCAA Tournament.

Remember what happened?

Trojans Wire wrote about it:

“One would have thought that USC baseball’s brand name would have been enough to get this team into the NCAA Tournament, in much the same way that UCLA basketball has gotten into the field when it had a bubble-licious resume in recent seasons (2021, 2015).

“It did not happen.

“USC — not viewed as one of the last four teams in the field, and projected to be well inside the cut line for the NCAA Tournament as recently as Saturday morning — was snubbed for the 2023 field of 64. The Trojans weren’t even one of the first four teams out. Arizona State, Kansas State, Kent State, and UC Irvine were all rated higher.”

The Trojans will be motivated to do better this season. If they don’t, it will be a crushing disappointment. However, they appear to be loaded with quality pitching. A moderate improvement on offense should have USC in position to play postseason baseball in late May, hopefully into early June. We will definitely follow the coming season here. Stay with us for USC baseball coverage!

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Andy Stankiewicz revived USC baseball in 2023, has Trojans poised to do bigger things in 2024

Andy Stankiewicz gave USC a real boost this year.

There are many Christmas blessings to note at USC athletics in 2023. We spend so much time covering football and basketball around here (a necessary reflection of the visibility of revenue sports) that we need to recognize one person in particular who has transformed another Trojan program.

Andy Stankiewicz came to USC with a big task: Get USC baseball back to being a nationally relevant program. USC does have 12 national championships, five more than second-place LSU (which won the 2023 College World Series over Florida). This is the ultimate blue-blood college baseball program, but it has fallen on very hard times in the 21st century. USC cried out for a new leader who could bring the magic back to Dedeaux Field.

In Year 1 on the job, Andy Stankiewicz couldn’t have done better under the circumstances. He led USC to the brink of the NCAA Tournament. In the eyes of most experts, USC should have gotten in but was snubbed by the selection committee. At any rate, USC is likely to be better this upcoming season and should be able to make the 2024 NCAA Tournament. Stankiewicz has established a foundation at USC based on pitching and defense. He is building the program the right way and will have a motivated team ready to take the next step in 2024.

Christmas gifts at USC certainly include Andy Stankiewicz, who is doing his best to return a once-elite program to future glories.

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Former USC baseball standout Kyle Hurt lives his MLB dream with the Dodgers

A #USC Trojan made his MLB debut for the #Dodgers in Dodger Stadium. Kyle Hurt had a night he will never forget.

Anyone who plays for USC baseball knows the history and tradition attached to the program. USC has the most successful college baseball program of all time. Putting on the USC baseball uniform is an encounter with excellence, success, and a rich legacy.

Imagine being a USC baseball star and then getting the chance to put on the uniform of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Imagine making one’s MLB debut in Dodger Stadium. Imagine stepping onto a mound in a live MLB regular season game for the first time. Imagine taking the rubber and pitching to Fernando Tatis, Juan Soto, and Manny Machado as the first three hitters one sees in a big-league regular season game.

That’s what USC’s Kyle Hurt did on Tuesday. Hurt, a former Trojan, made his MLB debut with the Dodgers in Dodger Stadium. He blew right through Tatis, Soto, and Machado in the top of the eighth inning. He returned to throw a scoreless ninth inning, giving him two perfect innings in his first MLB regular season game. The Dodgers hammered the Padres, 11-2.

Hurt struck out the side in the ninth inning. He threw 24 pitches in his two perfect innings. Of those 24 pitches, 19 were strikes. Hurt could not have done any better. A dream night delivered a dream performance for Kyle Hurt.

Check out our Pac-12 football predictions roundtable for the 2023 season.

USC’s Duce Robinson not picked in 2023 MLB draft

This news ensures that Robinson will play football and baseball in the 2023-2024 college sports cycle for #USC.

Let’s be clear about all of this: It would have been great if Duce Robinson got picked in the 2023 MLB draft, particularly in the top 150 to 200 players. Robinson would have received solid up-front money and would have had reason to embark on a lucrative professional career. That’s his dream as a high-level athlete. We should want the best outcomes for every athlete (just as we should want the best for every person).

Duce Robinson, a football-baseball dual-sport prospect, didn’t get the news he wanted. That is unfortunate. He wasn’t picked in the 2023 MLB draft.

Robinson’s next step: Prove a thing or two at USC. Not getting drafted means Robinson will be able to play football and baseball for the Trojans this next season. He can significantly raise his value as an athlete in two different sports. It will be exciting to see what he can do as a Trojan, starting on the gridiron and then continuing with Andy Stankiewicz’s baseball program in February of 2024.

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