Baseball

Duke’s West Campus is littered with historic athletic venues—throw a rock far enough and you’re liable to hit the 70-year-old Cameron Indoor Stadium, where both basketball teams play, or Wallace Wade Stadium, the football team’s home since the Great Depression. Even Koskinen Stadium, the site of both lacrosse and soccer, isn’t exactly a spring chicken. The Blue Devil baseball team, too, has its own classic on-campus venue, Jack Coombs Field, built in 1951 and named after the most successful coach in Duke baseball history.

The Duke baseball program announced Tuesday morning that six more of its games will be held at off-campus venues this season.

The Blue Devils were already scheduled to play 18 times at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP) in downtown Durham, and the team’s 13 remaining home games were to be played at Jack Coombs Field, Duke’s traditional home on West Campus. However, six of those contests have now been moved to the USA Baseball National Training Complex in Cary, N.C., meaning that the Blue Devils will play only seven games on campus this year.

Duke opens up its home schedule this wekend against traditional Atlantic-10 conference power Fordham. Although the Rams (0-3) have garnered over 4,000 wins in their 150 seasons—the most wins in NCAA Division I baseball history—the last decade was forgettable, as Fordham has an NCAA tournament drought stretching back to 1998.

After losing three of four in their opening series against Baylor and No. 22 Georgia, however, the Blue Devils (1-3) are in no place to take any team lightly.