By MONTE DUTTON
As has been widely rumored and thinly dismissed, Sean McCarthy is no longer head baseball coach at Clinton High School.
As has been widely anticipated, Peyton Spangler is head baseball coach of the Red Devils. He is known in the community. He played at CHS and Newberry College. His father and brother used to coach at Presbyterian. They are now at Furman and Newberry.
Spangler, in fact, is coaching on Tuesday evening in the Clinton High baseball valley. He has coached the Post 56 Junior American Legion team since 2021. Clinton (1-1) plays Mid-Carolina at 6:30 p.m.
A physical education major at Newberry, Spangler expects to receive a masters degree from Lamar University (Beaumont, Texas) in December. He has taught and coached at Clinton High since 2019.
The season just completed at CHS was Spangler’s fifth as an assistant coach.
Spangler played on the Chapin Post 193/24 team that won the American Legion World Series in 2015. At Newberry, he played on a South Atlantic Conference champion in 2019.
Spangler is widely admired and respected. He is capable of filling big shoes. He now owns a pair.
Clinton has won three Region 4-3A championships in a row and the 3A state championship in 2023. McCarthy, who has accepted a teaching position in District 55, compiled a 129-55 record.
McCarthy will be missed by Spangler and most everyone else in the program.
This season I’ve watched more high-school baseball than college, and more college than major-league.
This is a reversal of a lifelong pattern.
Watching Wofford on Sunday, it occurred to me that the perfect Terrier would be named Golden Black.
The TV announcer said, “Manufacturing runs is what Wofford does.”
In two games against Presbyterian, Wofford manufactured 43.
Sunday was the day all the carriages went poof and turned into pumpkins. Wofford of the Southern Conference went home, as did High Point of the Big South. South Carolina ran out of wacky miracles and the last ones went the other way.
In the latter halves of those games, switching channels brought one disaster after another. I cut my losses and switched to NASCAR, where the conclusion I found unpleasant, as well.
Neither Clinton participant, Brett Young nor Carson Glenn, got a hit in Chapin-Newberry’s 6-5 victory over Greer on Friday night, but both walked and scored a run.
Most of Chapin-Newberry’s batting heft came from the bottom of the order as Bryce Satterwhite, Blake Stribble and Maddox Floyd were a combined 5/11 at the plate.
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