After a thorough thrashing at the hands of North Carolina this weekend, the Blue Devils have no choice but to get right back on the grind.
Duke closes out its 12-game homestand Tuesday, hosting East Carolina at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park with first pitch scheduled for 6 p.m. The Blue Devils started off the homestand 5-3 before being swept by the Tar Heels—three losses in which they were outscored by a combined 31-6 margin—and now need a victory against the Pirates just to escape with a .500 record.
“It’s okay after a ballgame like this or after a weekend like this to feel frustrated, but in no way can that make you apathetic or complacent,” Duke head coach Chris Pollard said after Sunday’s game. “You’ve got to work your butt off because it’s a long season, and the only way you turn this thing around is to grind it out.”
For a young Duke squad, there are a lot of mistakes to correct after a weekend filled with errors and mishaps against a much more polished North Carolina team. The Blue Devils (10-10) dug themselves into 3-0 deficits before they even came to bat in each of the series’ final two games, and committed a total of nine errors across the 27 innings this weekend.
Duke received more bad news during Saturday’s game, when left-handed starter Trent Swart exited after just one inning. Swart missed all of the 2015 season as he recovered from Tommy John surgery and was making a strong return to the mound this year, pitching to a 2.05 ERA in 22 innings before Saturday’s abbreviated outing.
With no further updates on Swart’s availability moving forward, Pollard will shift Cornell transfer Kellen Urbon into the weekend rotation. Urbon has excelled in his role as a midweek starter to begin his Duke career, taking the mound four times against nonconference opponents without allowing a single earned run.
Urbon came on in relief Sunday and tossed one inning against the Tar Heels, and Pollard said he could be available for an inning or two Tuesday—but the plan is for the Blue Devils to get their midweek ace ready for his first weekend start.
“We told him before the game started today that...we don’t obviously know until tomorrow or potentially later in the week what Trent’s status might be, so we have to prepare Kellen as if he would start next Saturday,” Pollard said. “So the fact that he pitched the seventh, the fact that he’ll be a short-stint guy on Tuesday, is because we’re setting him up to be able to go on Saturday if necessary.”
Without Urbon’s ability to eat up innings, Duke will instead piece together Tuesday’s game on the mound with a slew of relievers. The bullpen was already taxed during the weekend thanks to Swart’s brief outing and Pollard will likely need to use five or six different hurlers to navigate a potent East Carolina offense.
James Ziemba and Karl Blum have been go-to options out of the bullpen for the Blue Devils so far this year, combining for 22 strikeouts in 21 innings. Tuesday will be an opportunity for many of Duke’s other relievers to get into a rhythm on the mound and establish themselves as weapons moving into the heart of conference play.
“We’re going to run a lot of different arms and do kind of like what we did last year in the midweek—kind of whole-staff it—to try to give East Carolina some different looks, and we’ve got to do some things to get some guys going out of our bullpen a little bit,” Pollard said. “We’ve got to get Ryan Day more involved, we’ve got to get Jack Labosky more involved, so this midweek game will give us an opportunity to do that.”
The Pirates (13-7) are hitting a robust .303 as a team—more than 50 points better than their opponents—and boast seven regulars hitting .285 or better. With 32 stolen bases on the year and no starters slugging better than .500, East Carolina’s offense is based more around speed and contact than power, which will put pressure on the Blue Devil defense to be fundamentally sound and make the plays it failed to this weekend.
As Duke prepares to try and beat the Pirates for the first time in its last 14 tries, the team has a lot to work on. Pollard said the key for the Blue Devils will be communication, and confronting their weaknesses head-on so that they can be fixed moving forward.
“You can’t be afraid to talk about the hard things that need to be talked about, and then you bust your tail,” Pollard said. “You outwork people, and none of the problems that we have can’t be fixed with better communication and with hard work, and we’re going to have both of those in abundance, and we’ve got to make sure that with young guys, that we don’t allow frustration to become apathy or complacency.”
Hank Tucker contributed reporting.
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