Why CCU didn’t get the experience it was looking for in its season opener against Duke
Coastal Carolina is a young baseball team that needs experience.
How beneficial Saturday’s experience against Duke was is debatable, however.
The Chanticleers’ 2021 baseball season got off to a rough start, as Duke pounded out 14 hits in a 12-4 win at Springs Brooks Stadium.
The Blue Devils, who are ranked 16th in the country by Baseball America, also held the Chants to just three hits, and CCU was shaky in the field, committing four errors.
Coastal, which is ranked 23rd in the nation by Collegiate Baseball, had been 6-0 at Springs Brooks Stadium in home openers.
With the 2020 season cut short by the coronavirus last March 17, it had been 346 days since Coastal last played a game.
The shortened season also kept the Chants from gaining valuable experience last season, and they are a very inexperienced team starting this season.
Aside from redshirt junior center fielder Parker Chavers, who has started 118 games, no other Chant has started even 30 times in college, and the other eight position players had 138 starts combined entering Saturday’s game.
“Duke’s lineup, you’ve got guys when you look at their career stats have 300 or 400 at-bats in that program. They have some older guys,” CCU head coach Gary Gilmore said. “. . . We’ve got a lot of guys here who don’t even have 100 at-bats in their career. A large number of them don’t even have 50. That’s what we’re fighting right now. We have kids who just need to go out and play and get better and learn from mistakes. We’re trying to go out and play at a top 25 level, I’m not sure if we can do that today.
“It’s not that we don’t have good players. We have a whole bunch of guys trying to figure out if they can even play at this level of college right now to a certain degree.”
While most programs across the country got older by retaining seniors from 2020 because of the NCAA’s ruling granting an extra year of eligibility to all spring sports athletes, no Coastal seniors chose to return.
“We’re an anomaly in college baseball right now,” Gilmore said. “We have an extremely inexperienced team. We lost our No. 1 pitcher in January and we just went up against a team that is predicted to be a sleeper for Omaha and a one or two seed in a regional. We’re light years away from where they’re at, at this moment in time.”
Coastal scored in the bottom of the first, but got just one run despite loading the bases with no outs on a double-play groundout. Duke answered with two runs in the second and never again trailed.
The Chants could never mount any momentum. They scored in the first, fifth and seventh innings, and Duke answered with at least two runs in their subsequent at-bats in each case. Duke scored runs in the second, fourth, sixth, eighth and ninth innings.
Four of Duke’s runs were unearned.
“Our discipline defensively, our discipline making pitches, our discipline making plays in the field [is lacking],” Gilmore said. “We came up against a group today that was extremely disciplined in the things they did, and it showed. We made some mistakes that weren’t forced mistakes.”
Blue Devils starter Cooper Stinson allowed two hits and three runs – one earned – in five innings.
Much is expected from Nick Lucky this season, and the junior had a home run and double and scored two runs. But he also committed two errors at second base, where he has been moved after playing third base and outfield and his first two seasons in the program.
Sophomore shortstop Eric Brown had CCU’s other hit, going 1-for-3 with an RBI single in the fifth inning.
Chavers was walked twice and had an RBI while going 0-for-1, and Cooper Weiss, who along with Chavers is a preseason First Team All-Sun Belt Conference pick, was 0-for-4.
Redshirt sophomore Jacob Maton got the start and made his CCU debut after missing each of the past two seasons with injuries. He allowed four runs – three earned – on six hits with four strikeouts and four walks.
“It’s obviously a lot more fun than sitting around and watching for a couple years, but I obviously hope to throw a little better than I did today,” Maton said. “It was great being back out there. I didn’t really feel as good as I was hoping to feel going out there. A lot of things were off. . . . But being back out there again, there’s no better feeling than getting to play again.”
Maton used a fastball, slider and changeup, and his fastball was shy of the mid-90s, where it was in high school.
“Jacob has worked so hard to come back from two years of being out with Tommy John surgery. I just want to see Jacob Maton get back to where he was in high school,” Gilmore said. “Right now he’s 3 or 4 miles per hour off where he was in high school, and we’ve got to find it. He’s one of the hardest working, most dedicated kids I’ve ever been around, we just have to figure out where it’s at.”
Five other Chants also pitched, with only freshman righthander Teddy Sharkey not allowing a hit. He struck out the only two batters he faced in the eighth inning.
The Chants and Blue Devils will conclude the three-game series with a doubleheader Sunday beginning at noon. Coastal is expected to start junior righthander Nick Parker, who was 2-0 with a 2.25 ERA last season, in the first game and Wright State graduate transfer Daniel Kreuzer, who was 0-3 with a 6.20 ERA in 2020, in the second.
“I don’t really think that was a great representation of how we played in the fall and the guys we’ve got,” Maton said. “I don’t think it was a good show of what we’re capable of. I think we’ve got a lot of guys that can do a lot of things. We’ve got a lot of room for improvement, especially with the guys we’ve got.”
This story was originally published February 20, 2021 at 8:47 PM.
