If you were to tune into last night's regionally televised Duke-East Carolina baseball game in Greenville after the first half-inning, you would have thought that the Blue Devils were going to pick up right where they left off against North Carolina this weekend, when they shut out the Tar Heels 4-0 Sunday in Chapel Hill.
But after Duke (20-26) jumped out to an early 2-0 lead to start the game, the 19th-ranked Pirates (37-10) never looked back, matching the Blue Devils with two runs in the bottom of the first and putting the game out of reach with a stunning nine-run second inning.
"Coming off two wins against Carolina, we were feeling good and when we scored two runs in the first, we thought we'd be in for a pretty good game," shortstop Kevin Kelly said. "It just got away from us I guess."
Of course, this disappointment seemed far-fetched after the way Kelly started the contest. Leading off the game, the junior feasted on a 2-1 fastball by Pirate freshman Neal Sears, smashing his first home run of the year. Duke's leading hitter David Mason cushioned the Blue Devils' lead later in the inning with an RBI single that scored third baseman J.D. Alleva.
But the Pirates came storming back with a two-run first inning of their own, as first baseman Joseph Hastings' sacrifice fly drove in one ECU run and a passed ball thrown by Duke pitcher Patrick Hannaway (0-3) allowed another East Carolina runner to score.
However, this inning did not even pale in comparison to the next time the Pirates came to bat. After scoring one run early in the bottom half of the second inning on an RBI single by designated hitter Cliff Godwin, East Carolina exploded with two outs, scoring eight runs to close out the frame and, for that matter, the game. In this stretch, two Pirates--Hastings and Clayton McCullough--bombarded Hannaway and freshman Greg Burke by nailing two three-run home runs to put some distance between ECU and its visitors to the West.
"I guess we were kind of shell-shocked, but it was still early in the game," Kelly said of ECU's incredible second inning. "They have a really short fence and anything can happen with an aluminum bat in seven innings. We weren't down all together, but in the dugout it didn't seem like last weekend, that's for sure."
But East Carolina did not stop there--Godwin, who went 3-for-4 on the evening, upped his team-leading home run total to 13 with a solo shot in the fourth that increased ECU's lead to 12-2. A two-run dinger by Godwin in the sixth inning further augmented this advantage, giving the Pirates 73 home runs on the season, their fourth-highest total in school history.
"[Godwin] just didn't miss pitches," Kelly said. "I didn't think our pitchers did a real bad job, they just left some balls up in the zone and playing at that park, the ball carries pretty well."
Duke's Mason knocked a homer of his own in the top of the seventh, but two ECU runs in the bottom of the eighth ended any remote chance of a monumental comeback by the Blue Devils.
Duke returns to action this weekend with an important three-game set against N.C. State that will determine who will hold outright possession of fifth place in the ACC. Kelly believes that the Blue Devils will have little trouble regrouping, despite the devastating nature of their defeat.
"After this kind of loss, we really can't get too down on ourselves because we have such a big weekend coming up against N.C. State," he said. "It would have been nice going into State with a three-game win streak. But I think by tomorrow, and definitely by Thursday, we're going to forget about this and focus on State. We'll be ready."
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