By last year's standards, the baseball team's 4-5 start looks sub-par.
Duke was 8-2 in the month of February last season, including an Atlantic Coast Conference victory over Clemson. So far, 1994 has been a different story.
"I think we've played reasonably well against a very tough early season schedule," Duke head coach Steve Traylor said. "Basically, every game we've played has been a close game going into the late innings. We blew Navy out one game and we blew Coppin State out, but every other game has been anybody's game in the late innings -- which is what we thought was going to happen when we made this schedule."
Duke replaced North Carolina A&T, East Tennessee State and Maryland-Eastern Shore with West Virginia and Navy to start the '94 campaign.
"We've made incremental steps every year in our schedule," Traylor said. "We bit off a bunch this year, assuming that we had more and deeper pitching -- assuming that [Scott] Schoeneweis would be healthy from day one, assuming that Richard Dishman would be able to pitch, assuming that [Craig] Starman wasn't going to get hurt."
Starman's injury is the latest blow to a fragile Duke pitching staff already hampered by Schoeneweis' arm troubles and Dishman's broken right wrist. The Blue Devils learned Monday that they had lost Starman, a right-handed junior, for the rest of the season to a torn ligament in his pitching elbow. According to Traylor, the unexpected departure of would be-senior Tony Runion to the minor leagues and the loss of an expected recruit who backed out on his commitment to Duke at the last minute have also contributed to Duke's pitching woes.
"He was pitching great -- he was the guy that we really thought was going to pick up a lot of the slack," Traylor said of Starman, who leads the team with 23.1 innings-pitched. "That's a big chunk to be missing, and right out of the middle -- I mean, he's probably a 100-inning guy who we're not going to have."
Traylor, however, has been experimenting with ways to bolster his weakened pitching staff, and yesterday worked junior infielder Casey Jowers on the mound.
"He's got a knuckleball he can throw," Traylor said. "We're trying to see if he really can throw that for strikes."
Duke's offensive output has clearly improved in 1994, and it may be the factor which carries the Blue Devils through the season. First baseman Scott Pinoni leads the team with a .433 average, four home runs and eight RBIs in 30 plate appearances.
"Pinoni's off to a hot start, and so are [Jeff] Piscorik and [Sean] McNally," Traylor said. "And we've got guys like Ryan Jackson who are hitting about .200 right now. We know they're .300-type hitters who are going to be very productive as we get on into the season."
The good news is that the Blue Devils have nearly three weeks until they open the Atlantic Coast Conference season at N.C. State March 18. That should give Duke time to heal some of its wounds.
"Overall, I'm not pleased with a 4-5 record, but I'm pleased with how hard our guys are playing," Traylor said. "We haven't put it all together, and we're still finding our identity a little bit. But we haven't executed as well as we need to execute offensively, and we haven't been consistent enough defensively to win as many of these close games as we would have liked."
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