Fall ball: Duke baseball stays sharp with contest against Canadian team, annual intrasquad Fall World Series

As the saying goes, baseball is America’s national pastime—but the Blue Devils are doing their best to stretch it across international borders.

Coming off its first NCAA tournament appearance in 55 years, Duke highlighted its fall schedule with a scrimmage against the Academy of Baseball Canada Oct. 18. The international competition is nothing new for head coach Chris Pollard’s squad, which has now hosted a scrimmage against Canadian or Czech teams each of the last four seasons.

“It’s important because our guys look forward to it because it’s a different jersey. There’s a different level of excitement and adrenaline that comes along with playing a true opponent, as opposed to an intrasquad game where you’re scrimmaging against each other,” Pollard said. “This is great because playing against an outside opponent gives you a small taste of what that adrenaline is going to feel like when you get into the spring.”

Although the Blue Devils easily dispatched their Canadian foes on the field with a 15-0 drubbing, the experience of playing in a game-like setting is a valuable change from the 16 intra-squad scrimmages and 27 practice days that comprise the team’s fall schedule.

Several Canadian players have enjoyed success in the major leagues—including perennial All-Stars Joey Votto and Russell Martin—but have yet to fully integrate into major collegiate programs, making it more difficult for Pollard to schedule them on a regular basis.

Pollard said he needs to “keep his ear to the ground” with regards to organizing games against Canadian teams. In 2014, Duke hosted the Ontario Blue Jays—one of Canada’s most elite amateur baseball programs—but they were not making a trip to the U.S. this year, forcing Pollard to work through other avenues to get a game with the Academy.

The Czech team, on the other hand, makes a trip to America every other year as part of a qualifying tour for major international tournaments. They have a standing date to play the Blue Devils on each circuit, and Pollard said they have already set up a scrimmage for 2017.

Last year, the Czechs battled Duke to a 5-5 draw—after the Blue Devils blew them out 13-1 in 2013—and Pollard’s squad is anticipating another close matchup with the rising program next fall.

After splitting the series’ first two games, Lewallyn and the Black team held on in a back-and-forth rubber match for a 10-8 victory and claimed the 2016 crown. In addition to good-natured ribbing and bragging rights, the victors get to design personalized sweatshirts with the phrase “Duke Baseball Fall World Series Champions.”

“That’s a lot of fun to do, and that sort of cements the bragging rights as well,” Lewallyn said. “You can wear that sweatshirt in the locker room and then there are people who don’t have that sweatshirt. It’s fun to sort of say, ‘I have this and you don’t.’”

Combined with the team’s daily work and live reps, the international scrimmages and Fall World Series are all part of Duke’s fall plan to simulate situations in which players have to respond to pressure and adrenaline that come into play during games.

Competition is a mantra for Pollard and his coaching staff as they gear up for the regular season, eyeing a second straight postseason berth in arguably the toughest conference in the nation.

“We want to put our guys in competitive situations, whether that’s on the field, whether that’s in a scrimmage, whether that’s in the weight room, and we want to compare them to each other,” Pollard said. “We get a sense of what their strengths are and how we want to use those strengths.”