RUSSELLVILLE - Nobody wearing a Russellville uniform was happy when they left the ballpark late Thursday night, least of all Judd Ward.
The Golden Tigers had just suffered a nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching loss to Mortimer Jordan in game two of their first-round playoff series, the kind of game where fans, players and coaches on both sides were hanging on every pitch from pretty much the fifth inning on. Ward, the team’s senior centerfielder and reigning Class 5A Player of the Year, was more upset than most, having taken what he felt was a borderline pitch for a called third strike after first failing twice to get down a bunt with the tying run on base and no outs in the top of the seventh.
The Blue Devils would hold on for a 3-1 win, handing the Golden Tigers their first home loss of the season, ending their overall win streak at eleven and sending the series to a decisive game three. Frustrated, disappointed and just plain mad, Ward was anxious to put the game behind him.
“I just wanted to go home and get some rest and forget about that one,” said Ward, who was also caught stealing for the first time this season following a first-inning double in Thursday’s second game and finished the doubleheader 2-for-7 at the plate. “It hurt, but that’s baseball. You have to move on.”
Ward talked about the game by phone with his dad, David, an assistant coach for Vina who had already headed over to northeast Alabama with the Red Devils to get ready for the next day’s first-round series at Spring Garden. [Judd’s older brother Jake, a 2010 RHS graduate, is Vina’s head coach.] After that brief conversation, Ward was ready to close the book on a tough night.
His head coach, however, had other ideas.
Of greater concern to Chris Heaps than losing the game was the way his team handled itself in the midst of an environment that got a little, shall we say…chippy. Mortimer Jordan ace Dalton Hall, who held Russellville to just two hits in 5.2 innings and also slugged a tie-breaking two-run homer, got a bit demonstrative at times, and Heaps felt as though his players allowed themselves to be drawn into a war of words that was counterproductive to the cause. The Golden Tigers’ mental approach deteriorated from there, and Heaps felt compelled to address the matter with his team on Friday afternoon.
“We got out of our element last night,” Heaps said. “We let our emotions get the best of us, and our body language was bad. We were blaming other people and making excuses for what was happening, and you can point fingers and play the blame game all day long.
“We have a standard for our program when it comes to that kind of stuff, a standard that we’re not gonna compromise. It’s about having a good attitude and making positive comments, not negative ones. I blew them up a little bit today, because we fell short of that standard last night.”
With the blessing of RHS principal Jason Goodwin and RCS superintendent Heath Grimes, Heaps brought his players down to the baseball facility Friday afternoon for what he termed “a working lunch.” In addition to disposing of roughly 30 boxes of chicken fingers from Speedy Pig, the Golden Tigers spent 90 minutes in the batting cages trying to correct a few issues that had seen them go 8-for-46 at the plate the previous night.
“Every coach we had at every station really re-emphasized our approach,” Heaps said, “just knowing the difference between a pitch you can hit hard and a pitch you need to spoil. We really worked on soft stuff away, staying back and driving the ball to that oppo gap.”
Facing elimination for just the second time in 11 playoff series dating back to 2015, Heaps fully expected to see his team rise to the occasion. Once Friday’s game got underway, it didn’t take long for the Golden Tigers to prove their head coach right.
Senior rightfielder Colin Garrison stroked an opposite-field line drive over the shortstop’s head for a leadoff single in the bottom of the first, and Ward—another lefty—followed a few pitches later with an RBI double down the left-field line to make it 1-0. It was the first of three extra-base hits on the day for Ward, who wound up hitting for the cycle and driving in four runs to spark a series-clinching 11-0 rout that punched Russellville’s ticket to the second round.
“Great players don’t make excuses. They make plays,” Heaps said. “I wanted to see our guys come out today and have that savvy that a baseball player should have. This was a good response.”
The Golden Tigers, who batted a collective .389 in ten regular-season home games with 21 home runs and 96 runs scored, were up to their old tricks again on Friday at Russellville Baseball Stadium after the previous day’s surprising struggles. Russellville (30-9) banged pitches over and off the fence all game long, finishing with three homers, five doubles and a triple amongst 14 total hits.
“We stopped expanding the zone forward and lunging out at the baseball,” Heaps said. “Once I saw that we were sitting on that back leg and driving the baseball, I had a feeling things were gonna go our way.
“It’s our job to coach these guys up, and it’s their job to respond to what we tell them and to do what we ask them to do. They did. I knew we were the better team. But like I told our guys last night, the best team doesn’t always win. You have to perform. And today, they performed.”
Senior Skylar Holland went 2-for-3 with a double and a homer, and junior Jeff Lloyd ended things in the bottom of the sixth with a walk-off two-run blast, his first career varsity home run. It was Ward, however, who delivered a performance for the ages.
Following his first-inning double to the opposite field, Ward crushed a high offering from Blue Devil starter Trent Fletcher over the scoreboard in right for a monster third-inning homer, his third of the season.
“He made a mistake with an off-speed pitch on that one,” said Ward, who now has nine career homers at the varsity level. “He left it up, and I put a good swing on it.”
Ward nearly left the yard again in the fourth, driving a pitch from reliever Ian Ellerbrock off the fence in right-center for a two-run triple to make it 7-0.
“It was a hanging curveball,” said Ward, who had struck out against the lefty Ellerbrock on that called third strike the night before. “It missed the barrel, so I was glad to get a triple out of it.”
That left Ward just a single shy of hitting for the cycle, a fact he was well aware of as he stepped to the plate leading off the bottom of the sixth against reliever Garrett Green. Ward watched three straight balls miss the plate before Green ran the count full.
“I definitely didn’t wanna walk,” Ward admitted after the game.
He didn’t, lashing a low liner just inside the bag at first. As the ball scooted toward the right-field corner, Ward geared down and idled into first base, opting for his first career cycle instead of his fourth extra-base hit of the day.
“He probably could have had a double or a triple,” Heaps said, “but I’m okay with that. You don’t see somebody hit for the cycle very often. It’s pretty special.”
Ward, whose 4-for-4 day raised his season batting average to .398 and left him just seven hits shy of 200 for his varsity career, said he had only hit for the cycle once before, when he was playing travel ball.
“It feels good,” he said. “I’m seeing the ball good right now and swinging at good pitches.”
When the Golden Tigers, who will travel to Arab for a second-round series next weekend, take the same selective approach, the results are impressive. With two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the second on Friday, senior catcher Russ Carpenter smashed a double to deep center. Junior second baseman Rudy Fernandez, batting in the nine-hole, followed with another double to deep left, driving in courtesy runner Devin Buckhalter to make it 2-0. Fernandez scored when Garrison reached an error, stretching the lead to 3-0.
Solo homers by Ward and Holland in the third chased Fletcher from the game, and then Russellville put it away with another two-out rally in the fourth. Fernandez started things with an infield single, and then Garrison laced a double into the gap in left-center. Ward’s triple made it 7-0, and then Cody Greenhill ripped an RBI single to left. Holland followed with an opposite-field drive to the fence in right-center for his team-leading 17th double of the season, bringing home Greenhill to make it 9-0.
When Landon Ezzell followed with a single to left, the Golden Tigers had put together six consecutive two-out hits. They ended the game an inning early in the sixth when Lloyd hammered a pitch out to right-center for the team’s 35th home run of the season, 25 of which have come at home.
Somewhat overshadowed by the offensive resurgence on Friday was a clutch outing on the mound by Holland (5-2). The senior right-hander worked around a pair of hits in the top of the second and two more in the third, then didn’t give up another hit the rest of the game. He finished with five strikeouts and no walks in six crisp innings, throwing 51 of his 75 pitches for strikes and inducing 10 groundball outs.
“Skylar pitched his tail off,” Heaps said, “and we made some big defensive plays behind him.”
The Golden Tigers were indeed sharp in the field, getting a handful of nice plays from Ezzell at short and another from Fernandez at second. Their quest for a third consecutive Blue Map will live on for at least one more week.
Baseball, of course, invites superstition more than any other sport, and Heaps is no exception. He elected to have the Golden Tigers wear their gold jerseys on Friday, the ones they wore while clinching state titles number one and two in 2015 and 2016.
“These gold jerseys have won a lot of games,” he said afterward, “but it’s not the jerseys that win—it’s the guys who wear them.”
