With the season more than halfway over, the Blue Devils are still searching for the right combination on the mound. Duke allowed another 15 combined runs in back-to-back losses to Pittsburgh, and the Blue Devils' pitching woes have now lasted for more than three weeks.
Duke will have a unique opportunity to reset and potentially change its season’s fate when it breaks from ACC play to face a fellow hometown team for the first time in more than eight decades.
After facing one another more than 10 times in the 1920s and 1930s, the two teams will revive the Battle of Bull City when the Blue Devils face the Durham Bulls in an exhibition game at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park Tuesday at 6 p.m. Duke will have a rare opportunity to face a professional team, and will look to turn things around in a low-pressure environment.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do ever since I was a little kid,” Blue Devil head coach Chris Pollard said. “I always thought about how fun it would be to play in one of these games where a college team matches up against a pro team, and I want our guys to have fun and enjoy it.”
The idea of placing college teams and professional teams in Durham against each other is certainly not new. Duke—then called Trinity College—first took the field in an exhibition game against a local professional team on April 24, 1902, when it faced the Durham Tobacconists one year prior to the first World Series in 1903.
The Durham Bulls were not established until 1913, but they did play their first game as the Bulls at Hanes Field located on Duke’s East Campus. After that, the teams met another four times prior to World War I, and more than a dozen times in the 1920s and 1930s before the teams' most recent meeting on April 17, 1933.
Almost 84 years later, the two squads will need to make changes as they face an unfamiliar opponent, and perhaps the most notable of these shifts will come at the plate.
“I think the hardest adjustment will be transitioning over to wood bats,” Pollard said. “The biggest adjustment for us will be swinging the wood bats since we don’t get a chance to do that very much in the middle of the season.”
The Blue Devils will use wooden bats, rather than their normal BBCOR bats, Tuesday in order to comply with the rules of Minor League Baseball since the Bulls will be the home team. But this adjustment should not be too difficult for Duke despite its recent use of metal equipment at the plate.
Many high school leagues across the country use wooden bats, and the Blue Devils also occasionally practice with wooden bats in order to be prepared for special situations like this one.
Although Duke may lose some flexibility and pop at the plate, the exhibition will allow Pollard to mix and match his pieces in order to try and get his team ready for the home stretch of the season. At 5-7 in the ACC, the Blue Devils need to find some momentum heading into the heart of their conference schedule if they want to get back to the NCAA tournament.
“We’ll get to play a lot of guys and anytime we get a chance to play a lot of guys there are opportunities to develop,” Pollard said. “We’ll continue to be able to work at some things, from a pitching standpoint, that we need to work at, and maybe we can use this as a chance to hit the reset button and be ready to play some good baseball down in Coral Gables.”
Following Tuesday’s exhibition matchup, the Blue Devils will have the rest of the week off prior to beginning a three game series at Miami. Duke is 1-7 in its first eight games away from home this season and will be in search of its first road series win of 2017.
Mitchell Gladstone contributed reporting.
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Digital Strategy Director for Vol. 115, Michael was previously Sports Editor for Vol. 114 and Assistant Blue Zone Editor for Vol. 113. Michael is a senior majoring in Statistical Science and is interested in data analytics and using data to make insights.