Twenty-four hours after Michael Sharman threw a complete game to even the series, No. 15 Clemson went out and took the whole thing.
The Tigers beat South Carolina 7-2 on Sunday afternoon at Doug Kingsmore Stadium to win the Palmetto Series 2-1, outscoring the Gamecocks 11-3 over the final two games after getting shut out 7-0 on Friday night. Clemson trailed 2-0 in the second inning. By the fourth, the Tigers led 5-2. By the sixth, it was 7-2 and South Carolina was burning through its sixth pitcher of the afternoon.
That’s what a team looks like when it figures something out over the course of a weekend.
The Bullpen Locked It Down
Talan Bell gave South Carolina everything it was going to get in the second inning. Dawson Harman’s two-out, two-RBI single to left field put the Gamecocks ahead 2-0, and for a moment, it felt like Friday’s energy might carry into Sunday. It didn’t.
Bell settled after that second inning and finished four innings with three strikeouts and zero walks. He held South Carolina hitless over his final two frames and kept the Tigers in the game long enough for the offense to take over. Fifty-nine pitches, 44 strikes. Solid enough.
Then Drew Titsworth walked in and shut the door. Three innings. Zero hits. Zero runs. Three strikeouts. He walked two batters, but South Carolina never got a runner past first base against him. Titsworth earned the win to improve to 2-0, and his three hitless frames gave the Clemson coaching staff exactly what they needed to bridge to the back of the bullpen.
Joe Allen threw a scoreless eighth on 14 pitches. Danny Nelson struck out two in a clean ninth to finish it. From the fifth inning on, South Carolina managed zero hits, zero runs, and one baserunner. Five innings of nothing. That’s how you close out a rivalry series.
The Offense Kept Coming
Here’s what separated this game from Friday’s disaster. Clemson scored in four of the first six innings. Not one big inning. Not one swing that carried the whole game. Runs in the second, third, fourth, and sixth. Steady, constant pressure that forced South Carolina to burn through its pitching staff.
The second inning was chaos in the best way. Jacob Jarrell walked. A wild pitch moved him to second. Jason Fultz Jr. got hit by a pitch. Jack Crighton singled to right to load the bases. Another wild pitch from Trey Goodman scored Jarrell and moved runners to second and third. Ty Dalley grounded out to second, but it scored Fultz. Two runs on one hit, two wild pitches, a walk, and a hit batter. South Carolina’s starter was already unraveling.
The third inning put Clemson ahead for good. Tryston McCladdie walked, Nate Savoie ripped a double down the third base line, and Tyler Lichtenberger singled to left center to score both of them. Just like that, 4-2 Clemson. Goodman was already out of the game, pulled after walking McCladdie on 50 pitches. Russell came on and gave up the two-RBI single to Lichtenberger on the first batter he faced.
The fourth inning was Ty Dalley. First pitch he saw from Lee. Right field. Gone. His first career home run as a Tiger, and it came in a rivalry game with 6,678 fans watching at Doug Kingsmore. That’s a moment the freshman won’t forget. Dalley finished 1-for-2 with two RBI, two walks, and a stolen base. He reached base in all four plate appearances.
The sixth inning was the dagger. Jarrell reached on an error. Fultz got hit by a pitch for the second time. Crighton laid down a sacrifice bunt to move the runners. Dalley walked to load the bases. Then McCladdie, with two outs and the count 1-2, lined a single to right field that scored two. Both runs were unearned because of the error, but McCladdie’s at-bat was the one that mattered. Two outs, bases loaded, down in the count. He put the ball in play and put the game away.
South Carolina Couldn’t Find Answers
The Gamecocks used six pitchers in eight innings, threw 157 pitches, and gave up seven runs. Goodman lasted two innings. Russell lasted one. Lee lasted one. Parks went 1.2. Gregoire threw 1.1 scoreless innings, and Foster got through the eighth clean, but by then the game was long decided.
South Carolina finished with four hits. Will Craddock went 0-for-3. Ethan Lizama went 0-for-4. The 3-4-5 hitters in the Gamecock lineup, LeCroy, Scobey, and Hollins, went a combined 1-for-10 with three strikeouts. After the second inning, South Carolina managed one hit the rest of the game. One hit in seven innings.
Goodman’s two wild pitches in the second inning were the turning point. Instead of getting out of that frame with the 2-0 lead intact, he handed Clemson two runs without giving up a hit that scored a runner. That’s a pitcher beating himself, and it changed the complexion of the entire afternoon.
Michael Sharman Wins the 2026 Bob Bradley Award
Before Sunday’s first pitch, Michael Sharman was honored with the 2026 Bob Bradley Award for the most outstanding player of the Clemson-South Carolina series. Nobody in the stadium was surprised.
Sharman’s Game 2 performance was the kind of start that defines a series. Nine innings. Four hits. One earned run. Zero walks. Seventy-eight pitches, 67 of them strikes. An 85.9% strike rate in a rivalry game. He induced 11 groundball outs and 11 flyball outs, never letting South Carolina’s hitters get comfortable in the box. The game lasted two hours and two minutes.
Think about that. A complete game on 78 pitches in a rivalry series with zero free passes. After Friday night’s disaster where Clemson’s pitching staff issued five walks, hit three batters, and threw four wild pitches, Sharman came out Saturday and threw the most efficient game of anyone on either pitching staff all weekend.
“We pitched well all weekend. Obviously, Michael Sharman deserves the spotlight, but for our entire pitching staff to hold the opposition to four hits in each game all weekend, that’s a big-time performance.”
Erik Bakich
Without that performance, there is no series win. Sharman saved the entire bullpen for Sunday, gave the coaching staff flexibility they wouldn’t have had otherwise, and completely shifted the momentum of the weekend. The Bob Bradley Award couldn’t have gone to anyone else.
What This Series Win Means
Clemson is 10-1. The only loss came in the Friday opener when the battery committed five miscues and the offense struck out 15 times. The Tigers responded by winning two straight, outscoring South Carolina 11-3 and outhitting them 15-8 over Games 2 and 3.
Here’s the real story from this weekend. Clemson got punched in the mouth on Friday, and instead of letting the weekend slip away, this team adjusted. The bats woke up Saturday with nine hits and Savoie’s three-run homer. On Sunday, the lineup manufactured runs in four different innings, drew four walks, and put pressure on six South Carolina pitchers. That’s a lineup that learned from Friday’s failure and corrected it over two games.
The pitching staff was the bigger story. After Friday’s 150-pitch mess with four wild pitches and a passed ball, Clemson’s pitchers threw 207 combined pitches over Games 2 and 3 with zero wild pitches, zero passed balls, and just two walks. That’s a total reset. Sharman, Bell, Titsworth, Allen, and Nelson combined for 18 innings and three earned runs across the final two games.
This is the kind of series win that tells the rest of the ACC what Clemson is made of. A road loss in a hostile environment, a complete game that held South Carolina to four hits, and a home closeout where the bullpen gave up nothing over the final five innings. Ten wins in eleven games, a rivalry series in the bag, and a pitching staff that proved it can respond after a bad night.
Up Next
Clemson heads to Fluor Field in Greenville on Wednesday to take on Michigan State. First pitch is set for 6 p.m. on ACC Network Extra. Clemson is riding a two-game winning streak into the midweek matchup before hosting La Salle for a three-game set starting March 6, 2026.
