A fun Friday at the ballpark.
Well, actually two ballparks and not as much fun as I had hoped.
The day began on Duke’s East Campus, where Duke’s softball team hosted Stanford in the first game of a best-of-three Super Regional.
The Blue Devils are seeded eighth, Stanford ninth. Duke is at home and they beat Stanford 4-2 earlier in the season.
Advantage Duke?
Not so fast. Duke didn’t get a chance to match skills with Stanford freshman phenom NiJaree Canady on the mound earlier in the season. She came into today’s game with an earned run average just below 0.5. No, that’s not a typo. She has high heat, a rise-ball that just doesn’t lend itself to solid contact.
But Duke jumped on her early, if we can define three clean singles and one run as jumping on any pitcher.
Singles by Deja Davis, Gisele Tapia and Aminah Vega scored a run. But Claire Davidson fanned with two outs.
Duke coach Marissa Young agreed that Duke missed an opportunity.
“We continue to talk about having good at-bats, with runners in scoring position. It’s tough to do against a great pitcher like Canady and she made us work.”
“She’s a great pitcher,” Vega added “We just went into the game knowing we needed to get on top of the ball. If we’re going to swing, we might as well get on top of it. She’s going to attack the zone. Don’t get behind on the count.”
For much of the game it looked like one run might be enough. Duke’s Cassidy Curd was matching Canaday BB for BB and trust me, those softballs looked like BBs.
Curd had six strikeouts through four innings.
But Stanford began to figure Curd out the second time through the order. The key sequence came in the top of the fifth runner on first, one out. Emily Schultz hit a tailor-made double play ball to Ana Gold at third. She flipped to second baseman Vega, who dropped the perfect throw.
Vega said she got ahead of herself.
“Take it one step at a time,” Vega said. “I think that’s what I need to focus on, calm down and take it one step at a time.”
Kaitlyn Lim followed with a double off the wall, two runs in and a lead squandered, Stanford’s first hit giving them a lead they never lost.
“I was just thinking about staying behind the ball,” Lim said. “Just hitting the ball hard and low into this wind.”
Curd said Stanford did a good job adjusting.
Stanford got a crucial insurance run in the top of the sixth off reliever Lillie Walker, a two-out double by Aly Kaneshiro adding the punctuation mark.
It was a crucial run. Claire Davidson led off the bottom of the seventh with a double that just missed going out of the park.
Down one, Duke could have played small ball for the tie. Down two, Duke had to hope for another hit against a dominant pitcher who seemed as strong in the seventh as she was at the beginning of the game.
“These are the toughest ones to lose,” Young summed up. “You have opportunities and you’re right there and you feel like you beat yourself.”
Young noted that Duke has experience in ACC play in losing the first game and coming back to win the series.
When will that next game be? Darned if I know. The weather forecast for Saturday is pretty dire. The ducks are making plans to stay inside. We could be looking at a potential twin-bill Sunday and we might have a long wait Saturday to get any clarity.
“We’ve got to put the best nine on the field to go out and compete,” Young said. “We work really hard on controlling what we can control.”
She added that we should expect to see Curd again and given the 1-0 deficit that could mean game two. It’s not like Duke can save arms for game three.
A hop, skip and a jump down the Durham Expressway and I’m in the press box at the Durham Bulls park watching Duke’s baseball team try to end a three-game losing streak.
It looked pretty good at times. Duke led Miami 1-0, 4-2 and 6-4. And couldn’t hold any of them. Most disturbing was the final blown save. For most of the season Duke freshman closer James Tallon has been pretty close to unhittable. But he blew a big save last weekend in Miami. Would a week off help?
Duke took that 6-4 lead in the top of the eighth on a two-run dinger by Luke Storm. Tallon had six outs to preserve the win and help Duke get back some of its shaky mojo.
He got only one of them. C. J. Kayfus homered to make it 6-5 and after a strikeout Yohandy Morales tied it with another blast. A walk, two more relievers and an RBI single by Renzo Gonzalez and it was 7-6. Duke had a final chance in the top of the ninth but a one-out single by Andrew Fischer came to naught.
Storm’s home run was his second of the night, Duke’s fourth. Jay Beshears and Alex Stone had the other two. All but the last were solo shots. Stone’s extended his hitting streak to 30 games.
Back to Tallon. Tallon is 19 years old and has pitched 32 innings, almost all of them high-leverage situations.
Is his gas tank empty?
“I don’t think it’s empty,” Chris Pollard said “but I think it’s running on fumes. Listen, there’s a lot of guys like that. That’s just the reality of playing a lot of young guys as much as we have. People asked me the entire month of April, because we rely so much on our bullpen, because we don’t have the luxury like a Wake Forest to get you six or seven innings (from the starters) into the ballgame, that we’ve really had to rely on these guys to take the ball a lot and we knew there was a chance some of these guys were going to hit that fatigue spot down the stretch.”
Pollard insisted that Duke has the resiliency and toughness to turn this around. The NCAA field will be revealed by early Monday afternoon and Duke is safely in the field, a two-seed a seeming lock. Two one-run losses in the ACC Tournament to teams headed for the NCAA field isn’t going to move the needle too far in the wrong direction.
I’ll have more next week on Duke’s baseball tournament journey. And hopefully the softball team’s College World Series journey.