MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — Fall ball at Clemson is much different than it was a year ago.

Last fall. Erik Bakich chose to rest some of his top pitchers during the fall, including ace Aidan Knaak. The end result wasn’t what was hoped for as the Tigers missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since Bakich was hired ahead of the 2023 campaign.

Knaak, who served as the Friday starter for much of the year, labored through the least productive season of his collegiate career, finishing with a 2-6 record, an ERA of 5.81 and his 57.1 innings pitched were by far a career-low. During his first two seasons, he pitched 83.1 and 90.1 innings, respectively.

After some of the struggles from last season, Bakich has chosen to take a different approach this fall, as Knaak has been a full participant in intrasquad scrimmages. The senior also started the 4-1 exhibition win over Coastal Carolina on Friday night at Pelicans Park in Myrtle Beach, throwing a scoreless first inning with one strikeout.

“It’s just a different mindset this year,” Bakich told The Clemson Insider after the exhibition. “More of an F-it. We are going to build our guys up, and we are going to play a lot of baseball.”

The goal of not having some of the pitchers throw last fall was to have them better rested for the stretch run of the season, as well as the postseason. However, as it turned out, outside of one game in the ACC Tournament, there was no postseason for Clemson.

“What we did last year, we put a target on development, but we didn’t connect the development in training to development in performing in games and performing in games to win and win championships,” Bakich added. “This year, we don’t just want to develop to get good in training. We want to get good at performing in games, and in games that are meaningful.”

Bakich has also made it a point to scrimmage more this fall, and all of those are scrimmages against one another.

Clemson has already played and won its first exhibition, but the second one, which was also against Coastal, was canceled due to weather. The next exhibition comes on October 31 when the Tigers travel to Atlanta to face Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets will then make the trip down I-85 the following day and play a second one in Clemson.

There are also some discussions to schedule a replacement exhibition for the one that was canceled, although nothing is official on that front as of yet.

At the end of the day, Bakich is doing everything he can to ensure the Tigers don’t have a repeat of last season, and that includes having all of his pitchers competing in the fall.

“Getting Aidan and getting everyone game action, we were not going to shy away from that,” Bakich said. “They needed to play more baseball. And we have played a lot more baseball in the young fall already than we have in a long, long time. Hopefully it pays dividends for us later, but with a lot of young talented kids, I think it has paid off for them for sure.”