Charlotte
Chris Pollard says he got advice from friends eight years ago when he was being considered for the vacant head baseball coaching job at Duke.
Friends told him to think twice about it, that leaving Appalachian State for Durham might not be a great career move. Duke hadn’t won an ACC baseball championship in half a century, and the Blue Devil program often was dwarfed by the conference’s giants.
“A lot of my closest friends said I was making a mistake,” Pollard recalled Sunday, shortly after his Blue Devil team edged N.C. State 1-0 in a tense ACC Baseball Championship game before 7,162 fans at Truist Field in Charlotte.
Pollard said he didn’t understand why making the move would be wrong.
“Who wouldn’t be intrigued at playing baseball at Duke?” said Pollard, who as a Davidson College product knew a little about playing baseball at a highly-regarded educational institution.
“And who wouldn’t want to play Duke baseball in the ACC?” he wondered.
Pollard made the change in 2013, got the Blue Devils into the NCAA tournament three years later, and now has an ACC title to justify his career move.
It was Duke’s first ACC baseball tournament championship. The last time the Blue Devils were ACC baseball champs, in 1961, was 12 years before the conference began holding a tournament.
In a tournament full of home runs and big offensive outputs, Sunday’s contest was a return to old-time baseball — a pitchers’ duel, where seemingly small plays loomed large.
The Blue Devils’ run came in the top of the fourth when Peter Matt’s sacrifice fly drove in Ethan Murray.
Otherwise, pitchers and defense dominated.
Duke starter Cooper Stinson worked six shutout innings, allowing three hits. Relievers Jimmy Loper and Marcus Johnson finished up, each allowing just one hit.
Meanwhile, N.C. State freshman starter Matt Willadsen of Holly Springs went 4.2 innings, and Chris Villaman finished, shutting down the Blue Devils without a hit and striking out six.
“That was my first look at Chris Villamon since he was in high school, and he’s all that was advertised,” Pollard said.
The play that will be talked about for a long time came in the bottom of the sixth. The Wolfpack’s Austin Murr reached on an error, went to second on an infield groundout, and took third on a Duke throwing error.
N.C. State cleanup hitter Terrell Tatum then lofted a fly to deep center field — seemingly deep enough to score Murr on a sacrifice fly. Murr left the base before the ball was caught and appeared to stumble as he returned to tag up; he was unable to score on the fly. Even if he had taken off, Duke centerfielder Joey Loperfido’s throw to the plate might have caught him.
“I heard R.J. (Schreck, the Duke leftfielder) say, ‘Shoot for it!’ ” said Loperfido, named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player. “I got rid of it in a hurry.”
The Wolfpack got singles in the eighth and ninth innings, but Duke’s pitchers kept the runners out of scoring position.
Just noting
▪ Duke (32-20) has won 12 games in a row. The Blue Devils had a 10-17 ACC record in early May, before the streak began. “I wish I could say there was a moment when things changed,” Loperfido said. “It was just a belief we have in ourselves.”
▪ Despite the loss, N.C. State (30-17) has an excellent NCAA resume and could wind up being a regional No. 1 seed — while playing on the road. The NCAA established a list of 20 schools as candidates as regional host sites, and N.C. State was not among them. There was discussion this weekend among baseball analysts that the Wolfpack could be a top seed at another site — perhaps in Columbia.
The NCAA baseball tournament field will be announced at noon Monday.
▪ Pollard said the Blue Devils almost lifted starter Cooper Stinson in the sixth inning when the Wolfpack got a runner on base with the heart of the lineup coming up. “It absolutely went against the analytics, to leave him in there in that situation,” Pollard said. “We had some disagreement about it, but Cooper deserved to stay in.”
Steve Lyttle on Twitter: @slyttle
This story was originally published May 30, 2021 2:38 PM.