Seven draft picks with Gamecocks ties, and why Amp Phillips is the arm to follow in Rays system

Seven. That’s how many players with South Carolina baseball ties heard their names called in the 2026 MLB Draft, part of the 29 picks with ties to the Palmetto State we laid out the night the draft wrapped. Three came straight off this spring’s roster. Four were free agents Kevin Schnall had just signed. And the first Gamecock off the board was a Lancaster right hander who spent exactly one season in Columbia.

That’s Amp Phillips, taken by the Tampa Bay Rays in the 15th round, No. 443 overall. He signed on July 27 for $150,000, so he is no longer a maybe for Founders Park in 2027. He is pro property now, and anybody who wants to keep tabs on him alongside the rest of the game’s MLB prospects has a board at RotoWire that lead prospect analyst James Anderson keeps updating well into October.

The Lancaster arm nobody saw coming

Phillips took the long road. Two years at Spartanburg Methodist. Then a stop at USC Upstate in 2025, where he won seven games, posted a 3.64 ERA and walked away as Big South Newcomer of the Year.

Then he came to Columbia and took the ball every single weekend.

Fourteen starts. A 4.39 ERA. Seventy one strikeouts in 67 2/3 innings, with opponents hitting .235 off him. Those numbers don’t jump off the page until you remember what that staff looked like this spring. On a pitching staff that spent a lot of the year searching for outs, Phillips was the guy you could pencil in.

His best night came April 10 against Missouri. Eight innings. Ten strikeouts. A 1 to 0 win, and SEC Pitcher of the Week honors to go with it. He also gave up one hit over six innings against Navy in February and struck out nine at Georgia in late March.

The Rays clearly liked what they saw, and Phillips liked the fit right back. “It’s actually a perfect fit,” he told The Lancaster News after the pick. “The Tampa Bay Rays are a very good pitcher development organization, and they spend a lot of time with their pitchers.”

He won’t be the only former Gamecock in that system

Here’s the part Gamecock fans will appreciate. Phillips walks into an organization that already has two former South Carolina arms on the farm. Matthew Becker finished the year at Single A Fort Myers with a 3.18 ERA in limited relief work. Lefty Garrett Gainey logged 69 2/3 innings at High A Bowling Green and struck out 75.

Tampa also grabbed Alex Philpott in the 16th round, although Philpott had already hit the portal and committed to Florida State before draft weekend.

And the alumni list beyond Tampa is getting longer every summer. Ethan Petry, the Nationals’ second round pick in 2025, split this season between High A Wilmington and Double A Harrisburg and finished with 24 home runs and 75 RBI. He hit .292 with a .917 OPS in August alone. Jack Mahoney went 7 and 1 with a 1.99 ERA through 13 Double A starts for the Rockies before a promotion to Triple A Albuquerque on August 5. Brett Kerry made a big league start for the Angels against Miami on August 8 and struck out seven. TJ Shook, a Columbia native, got his first taste of the majors with two innings against the Dodgers on August 17 after racking up 12 saves in Albuquerque.

That’s not a one year blip. That’s a pipeline.

Why college programs keep feeding the pros

The draft runs 20 rounds now. This year that meant 613 selections, and the clubs spending Day 2 picks on college pitchers are buying something specific: three years of SEC Saturdays as proof of concept.

Think about what Phillips showed a Rays scout. He handled a full weekend rotation workload in the toughest conference in the country, and he kept throwing strikes when the team around him was scuffling. A high school arm drafted in the same round is a projection. A college arm with 14 SEC starts is a scouting report.

That’s also why Schnall’s roster building comes with draft risk. Four of the free agents he brought in this summer got picked too: William Whelan by Texas, Miguel Hugas by Baltimore, Ethan Sutton by the Dodgers and Connor Shouse by Seattle in the 20th round, four spots from the end. When you recruit players good enough to get drafted, some of them get drafted. That’s the cost of doing business in this league.

Where to keep your eyes this spring

Phillips is 22, and he’ll get his first real pro sorting next spring when the Rays hand out affiliate assignments out of Port Charlotte. That’s when the numbers start meaning something. Watch the walk rate. Watch whether Tampa keeps him starting or moves him to the bullpen, because that decision usually tells you how an organization sees a 15th rounder.

In the meantime, Schnall just opened fall practice with a roster that looks a lot different from the one Phillips pitched for. When his first Gamecock team takes the field at Founders Park in February, keep one eye on the box score in Columbia and the other on a prospect board for a Lancaster kid who spent one spring in garnet and black and gave Gamecock fans a reason to start following the Rays.