Nine innings make up a baseball game, but sometimes just a single inning can make the difference between winning and losing.
The Blue Devils dropped their fourth consecutive ACC series this weekend, falling to Clemson in an abbreviated two-game set that was affected by inclement weather throughout the weekend. Rain caused the postponement of Friday’s opener and Sunday’s finale, but the two teams did hit the field for a doubleheader Saturday at Doug Kingsmore Stadium in Clemson, S.C., with the Tigers taking the first contest 6-2 and the second 8-1.
In both games, Duke was victimized by one big inning that allowed Clemson to build an insurmountable lead. A four-run fifth in game one aided by sloppy defense from the Blue Devils and a five-run fourth—which included four two-out runs for the Tigers—in the later game was enough for Clemson to secure the pair of weekend victories.
“We didn’t do a good job in those two innings, and they’re an explosive type of offense,” Duke head coach Chris Pollard said. “You look back over the course of the season, they kind of score their runs in bunches, and we knew that going in and we knew they swung the bats well at home. The reality is we needed to try to generate more offense to try and stay with them.”
Facing a pair of standout southpaws in juniors Matthew Crownover and Zack Erwin—who entered the weekend with a combined ERA of 2.03—Duke (22-17, 5-15 in the ACC) was unable to get the offense it needed. The Blue Devils mustered three runs across the two games and smacked just two extra-base hits. The offense struck first to give Duke early 1-0 leads in both games but could not capitalize and match the big innings produced by the Tigers (22-18, 11-9).
The Blue Devils fanned 18 times in Saturday’s doubleheader and had only two players—third baseman Max Miller and catcher Mike Rosenfeld—record hits in both games. The sluggish offensive output continued a season-long trend for a lineup that has had difficulty scoring consistently, but Pollard noted his club was on the right track early in both games—and was just unable to keep it going.
“We had really good at-bats against Crownover in the first inning of game one and we had good at-bats against Erwin in game two in the first. We just didn’t sustain it,” Pollard said. “Erwin just kept getting better and better as the game went on, and we didn’t do enough to get him out of his rhythm and kind of grind out at-bats. That’s just an area where we have to improve a lot.”
Although Clemson was able to sweep the doubleheader in large part due to the strong starts of Crownover and Erwin, Duke’s starters struggled to have any success getting deep into the game against the Tigers’ lineup. After turning in great performances against No. 5 Louisville last week, Dillon Haviland and Andrew Istler were unable to replicate those outings. The big inning tripped up both hurlers Saturday, with the left-hander Haviland exiting after 4 1/3 frames and Istler making it through 3 2/3 innnigs before departing.
With the starters leaving a void to be filled, the bullpen stepped up and shut the door to keep Duke’s deficits from ballooning even further. Freshman Luke Whitten came on in relief of Haviland to throw 3 2/3 scoreless innings in the first game, and Blue Devil relievers combined for eight innings of one-run, two-hit ball in the doubleheader.
Pollard pointed to the freshman trio of Whitten, Ryan Day and Jack Labosky as top performers from the bullpen during an otherwise down weekend for his team, and noted how their maturation throughout the course of the season is a positive indication moving forward.
“I thought all three of those guys flashed good stuff. Their stuff was live and they commanded the strike zone,” Pollard said. “The few times they did fall behind, they did a good job of challenging in the zone and forcing contact. That’s a good sign as we round here down the stretch.”
The pair of losses kept Duke in last place in the ACC Coastal Division. The Blue Devils will return to the diamond Wednesday at East Carolina before getting another chance to improve their conference record at home against Virginia Tech this weekend.
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