The prettiest thing about the baseball team's weekend series against Georgia Tech was the new Durham Bulls Athletic Park, where the Blue Devils lost 10-5 on Sunday. The Yellow Jackets scored a total of 29 runs in beating Duke three times this weekend, including Friday's 9-3 win and Saturday's 10-2 victory.
"Georgia Tech is a good baseball team--a very good baseball team," Duke head coach Steve Traylor said. "We have not played our best baseball against them in any year that I've been here."
Duke (25-14 overall, 4-11 in the Atlantic Coast Conference) has now dropped four of its last five contests.
In the first two outings, the Blue Devils were plagued by a lack of relief pitching, a factor which had been a positive for Duke prior to this weekend's series. In Friday's game, junior David Darwin threw six strong innings, and left the game trailing 4-3. But the Yellow Jackets went on an offensive tear, scoring four runs off freshman reliever Jim Fishburn in the eighth inning to take an 8-3 lead and put the game out of reach.
The next afternoon was nearly a repeat of Friday's outing. This time, it was senior Craig Starman who gave up only one earned run in seven innings before leaving the game in the hands of the Blue Devil bullpen, down only 3-1. But in the eighth, Georgia Tech pounced on freshman reliever Clayton Connor. Connor yielded six runs while recording only three outs, as the Yellow Jackets took a commanding 9-1 lead. Duke once again was unable to recover from Tech's offensive explosion, and the Blue Devils lost 10-2.
"Our bullpen consists of a bunch of freshman that maybe are having to pitch before their time," Traylor said. "Those guys got some innings early and did a good job, but they are going to have to go out there and battle their way through [a slump].
"They're doing the best that they can. They're young pitchers without great velocity who have to be sharp in order to be successful, and they weren't able to do that this weekend."
The mood after the second game was especially somber, as players trudged off Jack Coombs Field with their heads down.
"We just had two games where we had one- and two-run games in the eighth inning, and we weren't even close at the end," Traylor said. "[Tech] is a very good baseball team, and you have to finish the game off and drive people in, or the game is going to end up [in a blowout]."
Although the scenery changed as the Blue Devils moved to the DBAP for the last game of the series, the outcome did not. In a reversal of its performance in the first two outings, Duke started slow and then attempted to stage a comeback. Junior Scott Schoeneweis yielded eight runs in four innings, four of which came on a fourth-inning grand slam by Tech's Ryan Ritter. At that point, the Yellow Jackets led 8-1, and the game seemed out of reach.
But Duke managed a comeback, scoring four runs in four innings to cut the lead to 9-5, the closest it would come to capturing a win against Tech.
Two factors that hurt the Blue Devils during the first two games were inconsistent offense and defensive mental lapses. In Friday's game, Duke pounded out 10 hits, but could not string the hits together to produce runs. In the second game, the Blue Devil bats died, as Duke only managed six hits.
"We didn't hit the ball today," Traylor said after Saturday's game. "[Friday], we had 10 hits against a good pitcher, we scored three runs, and just didn't get a hit when we needed one.
"But we can't worry about the offense, because that's going to come and go. Walking people and not making plays defensively has hurt us as much as anything."
Duke also committed three costly errors in the series that led to Yellow Jacket runs. Two of the errors were committed by senior Jeff Piscorik, whose steady defensive play earned him the team's top defensive honors last season.
"I think that I'm in a rut along with the team," Piscorik said. "All you can do is keep your head up and keep playing as hard as you can. We still have 20 games left, so we're just going to play hard, and things will turn around."
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