ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE BASEBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

May 29, 2021

Chris Pollard

Truist Field

Duke Blue Devils

Postgame Press Conference

Duke 4, Virginia 2

CHRIS POLLARD: First and foremost, extremely happy for our guys. They deserve this opportunity. They've persevered. They've stayed committed to each other, and they've stayed committed to the program, and because of that, they've given themselves an opportunity to make a really cool run here down the stretch.

I think the conversation for today's game really starts with the job by Luke Fox on the mound, a true freshman who's just getting better and better right in front of our eyes, and obviously Joe Loperfido, a senior, who had just an unbelievable day for us at the plate.

Q. I was going to ask you about Fox's performance. Obviously gutted out seven, got out of some jams, but no walks from a freshman in that situation, impressive to say the least. Great control today.

CHRIS POLLARD: I can't say enough about his poise. He is a unique combination of tremendous physical abilities, he's got the fastball up to 94, he's got two off-speed pitches he throws in the zone, and he's a terrific athlete out there on the mound, and he's got a great mindset for a young guy. He's way more like a senior in terms of his mindset, his work ethic, his understanding of process. But then the third variable that makes him so unique and different is the competitive fire. You're talking about a guy who won two state championships in Wisconsin high school football as a quarterback, led his high school to back-to-back high school state championships as a quarterback, and if you've ever seen highlights of the guy, he threw it all over the field, he ran for scores, and he's just got that football toughness that he brings out there to the mound with him. Man, that was on full display today.

We made a mistake behind him, should have been off the field. He just kept making pitches, gave up some soft contact, didn't change his approach at all. And then we thought maybe he was running out of gas there in the sixth inning. He had some traffic and started to have what I thought maybe were some misses that suggested that he had some fatigue, but then it's like he found an extra gear there in the seventh inning. I thought the seventh inning he was as good as he was all day, and that's just him being tough.

Q. When did you decide you were going to go with Luke today? The TV announcers were kidding you about crossing them up because you said Cooper was going to pitch.

CHRIS POLLARD: Well, what we talked about was we went into yesterday morning with both Cooper Stinson and Luke Fox preparing to start the day, and we had a practice yesterday at UNC Charlotte. I said, I want you to both go through your routine today as if you're going to start tomorrow. We're going to watch the game, and then we're going to make a decision based on who our opponent is, who will start tomorrow, and then the other starter needs to treat it like a rainout and be ready to go on Sunday.

When UVA won, we thought the matchup was right to go with Luke, and also it gives us a veteran guy now to take the ball in a championship game tomorrow. Guy has made a lot of starts in his career here at Duke.

Q. To be able to make it to the ACC championship game, I know you've checked a lot of boxes off in the last few years, but what does it mean for you and this program to be able to make it to that spot for tomorrow?

CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, thrilled for our team and thrilled for Duke. I told our guys, I said, it felt like after Wednesday's win versus Florida State that that kind of was mission accomplished with respect to building our resume for the NCAA tournament. But since Wednesday, this has been about winning a championship and bringing hardware back to Durham. I reminded our guys of that today. They're relishing that. They really are. That's what this is about for our team.

You know, on Monday we had practice -- excuse me, on Sunday after we got back from Clemson, and the way we started practice was I showed a little five-, six-minute highlight video of all the news cycle that had happened in 1961, and I didn't give it any context before I played it, I just let the video run, and then I stood up after the video ran, I said, 1961, what does that mean to any of you guys, and we had some savvy guys who are a lot smarter than me, and they said, Coach, that's the last time that Duke won an ACC championship. I said, you've got it. There's nobody playing better than us right now in this league. Let's go down there and win four ballgames and change that from 1961 to 2021.

Q. I want to ask you about Joey Loperfido. It seems like he's been a constant all year. Even when the team was slumping he was going out there and giving you good at-bats every day. Talk about his leadership, what he's done on the field and off the field in the locker room for your team.

CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, we've talked about it before. He's been a leader in this program since his freshman year. You go back to 2018, you had all these veteran guys, you had a very veteran team, and here's this true freshman starting at first base who's assumed a really large leadership role, and from there he's continued to be a leader. Every year he's been a member of our leadership council, which is an elected group that serves to provide leadership that's player elected.

It's no secret he was disappointed when he was not drafted, even though it was a five-round draft. I think both he and I still thought he would go in those five rounds of the pandemic-shortened draft, and really struggled with the decision after he was not drafted. He had so many teams offering him a chance to start his professional career, and there was so much uncertainty, and he and I had a lot of really good conversations over about a three-week time period and tried to give him his space but also let him know that I was there for him and was going to support him no matter what decision he made.

I'll never forget I was sitting on my back porch in June when Joe said, hey, Coach, I want to come back to Duke, but I want it to be with a C on my chest, meaning hey, I want to be a captain for this program. He's come back, he's been a captain, he's been a great player, he's been a clutch player. I can't -- I don't have enough superlatives for what he's done and what he's meant to this team.

Today was kind of icing on the cake.

Q. Just to follow up on that about Joey, I know he had a good freshman year and then if I recall the sophomore year, an injury thing and he was never maybe quite all the way right. When you look at his development over the last two years to where he is right now, the dynamic player that it feels like he's become, how do you describe that evolution?

CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons that you come back. I always tell guys, when you start your professional career, you want to be ready, because you only get one chance. Oftentimes, especially in today's world, it's a pretty short leash.

Joe had that great freshman year. He was a freshman all-American. Comes back, he gets off to just a tremendous start but then breaks the wrist, misses 25 games, so he missed almost half the season with the injury. Comes back from the injury and leads us down the stretch on sort of a -- kind of a comeback like this year where we were sort of written off and left for dead, 3-9 in the ACC and we battled our way back and worked our way, kind of snuck into a regional, and then he was just terrific.

Last year he only gets the 16 games, right. He had missed a big chunk of baseball over the sophomore and junior year, and he's been able to make up for that this year, and one of the things I think he's done such a great job with in terms of taking advantage of this year that's going to help him be more ready for professional baseball is he's gotten so much better at handling left-handed pitching. He used the fall really well, and intentionally so, we matched him up all fall against left-handed pitching. We forced him to see a lot of lefties, and he continued to work at it.

Over the course of this year, you've just seen him get better and better against left-handed pitching and have some of his very best at-bats down the stretch here against lefties.

I think it's going to pay great dividends for him in professional baseball because he's going to be more ready to have success when he gets his start at the next level.

Q. Obviously no shortage of great things to say about Joey and Fox and what the guys have been doing lately, but what's the message to the team to try to keep them going with runners and scoring position? You guys really struggled in that area today.

CHRIS POLLARD: Well, you know what, I really don't think it's -- that today was as much about us as you're seeing arguably one of the best bullpens in the country. You're talking about, in my opinion, the best pitching staff in the ACC, and they're just loaded with veteran guys down there in the bullpen. We had to see Neeck, we had to see Whitten, we weren't expecting to Savino, but that group is really good, and you look at UVA as a staff, they're really good at producing swing-and-miss. That's a hallmark of that group this year. They're one of the very best in the country at producing swing-and-miss. They did that to us some today. We squared some balls up, but we also had 12 strikeouts. I really put that as much on our approach as I do the fact that we had to see really good arms.

But we survived it, and we were tough enough to overcome it. I think our guys are relishing an opportunity to get out and play tomorrow.

Q. What's it mean for your pitching staff having somebody going seven. You don't see that a lot in baseball these days; you have the pitch count and everything is high and then you have your bullpen and now tomorrow you've got a fresh bullpen knowing that you've got all hands on deck.

CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, you know, I think that's been the biggest difference for our team. Clearly we've been really good offensively in May, but you could look back over the season, we've been pretty daggone good offensively all year.

But one of the biggest differences in May has been the ability of our starting pitchers to work deeper into games, and you see it with Jack Carey. When Jack Carey moved to Friday night and starting getting us six, seven innings it seemed like every Friday night, it gave our bullpen a chance to kind of take a deep breath. We were putting so much pressure on our bullpen week in and week out having to go to those guys so early, and now you see it here in the tournament where we've had two really deep starts, and it sets us up pretty daggone well for tomorrow.

Q. The bullpen was a question mark going into the season, and now it's become a strength. You had a quick inning from Loper today, a quick inning from Johnson today. Everybody else is fresh. Talk about the development of the bullpen in general and specifically going into tomorrow. Is it all hands on deck, or do you think you'll just take your regular bullpen core?

CHRIS POLLARD: No, it's an all hands on deck, and we're ready for whatever kind of game will present itself. I think the thing we haven't talked about enough, and I haven't talked about enough, is the job that Chris Gordon has done in his first year as pitching coach.

Chris Gordon inherited an impossible situation. Duke has pitched really well over the last three years, and certainly Dusty Blake deserves an enormous amount of credit. He's now with the St. Louis Cardinals.

You have a brand new pitching coach who takes over three weeks before the season starts, and you've got all these inexperienced guys in the bullpen, and we don't have any roles defined yet.

To work through that and to work through some of the early-season struggles that we had, not because we were doing something wrong but just because guys were gaining experience. You start going down the list, Loper missed his freshman year with Tommy John, so he had just a couple of outings last year and then the pandemic hits. Marcus Johnson was a true freshman last year, had just a couple of outings.

Outside of that you're looking at guys that are making -- outside of Matt Dockman who are making their very first outings in a Duke uniform early this year, and we just had to gain experience.

The job that Coach Gordon has done of ushering those guys through that process, and now we're clearly pitching better than we have at any point during the season, he deserves an enormous amount of credit for handling a really difficult situation.