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Man on a Mission: Greenhill settles score with Faith Academy

MONTGOMERY - Thursday, May 19, 2016 is a date that Cody Greenhill will never forget.

When Greenhill, then a junior at Russellville High School, stepped on the mound at Montgomery’s Paterson Field that evening for Game 1 of the Class 5A state finals against Faith Academy, his record through nine playoff starts stood at 8-0. By night’s end, that perfect postseason mark was history, irrevocably stained by one of the worst outings of Greenhill’s varsity career: Nine runs allowed on six hits and two walks in 3.1 innings.

Thanks to a slew of early errors by Russellville, five of Faith’s nine runs were unearned, but that didn’t make the stunning 9-1 loss any easier to swallow for Greenhill. After the Golden Tigers rallied to win the series and claim a second consecutive state championship, he had the option of letting the Game 1 debacle fade into a footnote, forever forgotten.

But that’s not how Cody Greenhill operates.

“The number one thing with Cody is, he’s the most competitive pitcher, as far as his competitive nature and competitive greatness, that I’ve ever coached—in any program, not just Russellville,” said Chris Heaps, who spent 15 years as an assistant at Hartselle and one season as the head coach at Central-Phenix City before taking over the Golden Tiger program in the summer of 2012. “And I’ve been around a lot of really good ones. His competitive spirit is as high as I’ve ever seen.”

So instead of chalking up the loss to a rough night on defense and moving on, Greenhill took the opposite approach. He obsessed over every detail of his failure until they became seared in his memory, then waited patiently for his opportunity to settle the score.

That opportunity finally came last Wednesday night, May 17, nearly a year to the day since the 9-1 defeat that had dominated Greenhill’s consciousness and driven his desire for the preceding twelve months. He had made four more playoff starts in 2017, winning all of them without allowing an earned run and leading the Golden Tigers back to Montgomery for a third straight year. Awaiting them in the capital city was a rematch with Faith Academy and, for Greenhill, a shot at redemption.

“He wanted revenge on those guys for last year so much,” Heaps said.

Such was Greenhill’s thirst for retribution on the Rams that he wanted to recreate the exact setting from the previous year. The venue, of course, was the same, with the series opener slated for Paterson Field. Fate did him a favor, as well, when Russellville was once again designated the visiting team for Game 1 and assigned to the third-base dugout—just like last year.

Greenhill even went so far as to break with tradition—and superstition—with regard to Russellville’s wardrobe. All season long, in the biggest of games, the Golden Tigers had opted for their solid gold jerseys—the ones they wore while beating Helena 4-1 to clinch their first-ever state title in 2015 and again while sweeping a doubleheader from Faith last May to secure a repeat. Heaps assumed his team would go for the gold again last Wednesday night, but his ace pitcher had other ideas. Greenhill insisted on breaking out Russellville’s black-and-gold striped uniform tops—the same ones the team was wearing last May when the Rams routed them in Game 1.

“Going into the game, I wanted everything the same—just like last year, nothing different,” Greenhill said. “I wanted it exactly like it was. That way, when I got done winning, nobody would say it was the uniform or anything like that.

“When I came back and got my revenge, the only thing I wanted to be different was the result.”

That’s not entirely true, of course. In order to attain a different result, Greenhill knew he would have to deploy different tactics against a hard-hitting Faith Academy lineup that came into the state finals batting .390 and averaging nearly nine runs per game in the postseason. Last season, Greenhill arrived in Montgomery having ridden his plus fastball to a 13-2 record, but the Rams proved ready for that 90-mile-an-hour heater, roping it through holes and into gaps on their way to a Game 1 romp.

With largely the same lineup back again for Faith this season, Heaps, Greenhill and pitching coach Eli Fuller knew that a new approach was in order.

“We worked all week on pitching in and throwing breaking balls for strikes early in the count,” Heaps said. “I told him, ‘If you can do that, you’ll deal these guys.’”

Loosening up in the outfield prior to the game and then warming up with senior catcher Russ Carpenter in the bullpen, Greenhill felt good—really good.

“My arm felt good when I was throwing,” he said, “when I was long-tossing. Then in the bullpen, seeing those pitches do what they’re supposed to—I knew it was gonna be a good night.”

The Golden Tigers scored a run in the top of the first inning to grab the early lead, and then Greenhill—who had worked all week on fine-tuning his curveball and changeup—went to the mound with a very specific plan. Strike one is always the most important pitch a pitcher can throw, but Greenhill didn’t just hope to find the zone with his first offering of the night—he wanted to send a message.

“I told Coach Fuller I wanted to throw a curveball the first pitch of the game,” Greenhill said. “I wanted to let them know ahead of time that they couldn’t just be sitting on the fastball. This year, I was coming with all three.”

Leadoff man Jackson Bell dug in to start the bottom of the first, and Greenhill snapped off a 74-mile-an-hour curve that dropped in for strike one.

Message received.

“He had a great breaking ball,” Heaps later said. “When he got those first few pitches over, those breaking balls to those big hitters, I knew it was gonna be a good night.”

Greenhill retired Bell and Chris Sargent before getting ahead of Faith’s best hitter, senior third baseman Brooks Carlson, with a breaking ball and then blowing a high fastball by him for strike three. By the time Greenhill struck out the side in the bottom of the second, Heaps already knew what everyone else in the ballpark soon would—Faith was in trouble.

“His stuff was electric,” the coach said. “The McGill-Toolen game at the beach [in which Greenhill struck out 10 and allowed just four hits in eight shutout innings in a 1-0 loss] and this one, those are the two best pitching performances I’ve ever seen out of Cody. He was 93 and 94, his breaking ball was good—he was absolutely unbelievable.”

Greenhill recorded another strikeout in the third inning, then two more in the fourth and two more in a one-two-three fifth. An error, a balk and a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the sixth cost him what would have been an especially sweet shutout, but he bounced back to strike out the final two batters of the game in the seventh—locking up pinch-hitter Parker Mills with a blistering inside fastball on his 86th and final pitch of the night.

Greenhill finished with 11 strikeouts (one shy of his playoff career-high) in seven innings, walking just one and holding the Rams to a pair of harmless singles. Russellville cruised to a 9-1 win, mirroring the final tally of last year’s Game 1 rout.

Talk about settling a score.

“That was definitely in the back of his mind. He wanted his revenge, and he got it,” said Austin Kitterman, a former teammate of Greenhill’s who now pitches for Union University and provided color commentary for the NFHS Network broadcast of Game 1. “Throwing a two-hitter against the best-hitting team in the state? I was so happy to see him get it done. He’s got that bulldog mentality, as Coach Heaps likes to call it, and he wasn’t gonna lose. That wasn’t an option.”

Improved secondary pitches aside, Greenhill’s most fearsome weapon is still good ‘ol number one. According to a scout from the Arizona Diamondbacks, Greenhill’s fastball topped out at 96 miles an hour in Game 1 and sat consistently at 93-94 throughout the night.

“Ninety-six,” marveled Jacob Green, another former teammate of Greenhill’s and a hard thrower in his own right who has pitched the past two seasons at Shelton State Community College. “That’s a number not many people have ever put up—especially in high school baseball. Guys don’t normally put up that number until they’re in their prime, in their mid-20s. Here’s Cody doing that, and he hasn’t even graduated high school. That just shows how far ahead of the game he is at this stage in his career. He’s got that much more left in the tank. I’m very anxious to see what he can still become.”

What Greenhill became last Thursday afternoon, after Russellville bounced back from an 8-7 loss in Game 2 to hold off the Rams 7-4 in Game 3, was a three-time state champion. He also joined former Golden Tigers Reed Smith (2015) and Austin Bohannon (2016) as Class 5A championship series Most Valuable Players. Greenhill had a pair of key run-scoring singles in the decisive Game 3 and finished the series 4-for-10 at the plate with four RBIs, but it was his dominance on the mound in the opener that undoubtedly stood out in voters’ minds.

“That first game is super, super important. Cody set the tone,” said senior first baseman/pitcher Skylar Holland, who made a strong MVP case in his own right by going 7-for-9 at the plate in the series and tossing six innings of two-run ball to win Game 3. “Without that first win, I don’t know what would have happened. To bounce back from last year the way he did, it was well deserved.”

There’s almost no way to properly appreciate Greenhill’s Game 1 performance from last week without viewing it through the lens of his Game 1 failure from last year. Greenhill, who had told Fuller in the days leading up to last week’s start that he was “going for blood this time,” acknowledged as much last Thursday night, shortly after arriving back home in Russellville.

“It factored in a lot. I wanted another shot,” Greenhill said. “After last year, this was my chance to get back at them. I knew I’d get my revenge.”

That he did, thanks in no small part to lessons learned and adjustments made on the heels of last May’s Game 1 disappointment.

“I actually talked to some of [Faith Academy’s] players about Cody after the series was over,” Kitterman said. “They said they hit him last year because they could hit fastballs. This year, he kept them off balance, and he was able to get ahead with breaking balls.

“Cody was spectacular. From what I’ve seen, that was one of the best performances Cody has ever had, if not the best. He commanded the fastball well, and he threw his off-speed pitches for strikes, in any count. He had four straight starts without giving up an earned run, and he wasn’t gonna let the state championship be any different.”

Greenhill’s work in the 2017 postseason (five starts, five wins, zero earned runs allowed and 44 strikeouts in 31 innings) was even more impressive than Green’s historic run of dominance on the mound in the 2015 playoffs. After finishing off Helena on that late-May afternoon two years ago, Green stood along the left-field line at Paterson and talked about leaving behind a championship legacy and passing the proverbial torch to Greenhill.

“Oh my goodness. Cody has stepped up and filled my shoes and gone far beyond anything I ever thought about doing for that program,” Green said last Friday. “Me and him, we clicked, and we had a really great friendship in high school. We learned a lot from each other. We essentially taught each other more about our strengths and weaknesses than most other guys on the staff, just because of our similarities on the mound. We attacked hitters the same way and had a lot in common in that regard.

“He is just…wow. That’s the only word that comes to mind. Wow.”

Greenhill’s numbers do indeed boggle the mind. The 6’4, 215-pound right-hander went 12-2 as a senior with a 0.88 ERA and a school-record 144 strikeouts in 95 innings. He’s gone 39-9 since the start of his freshman season, tying him for fifth on the state’s career wins list. His 375 career strikeouts (in 305.1 innings) are the most in school history by a wide margin and also rank 19th in state history, according to the AHSAA website.

Given the level of competition and the high stakes, Greenhill’s playoff numbers shine brightest of all. In 15 career postseason starts, he went 13-1 with a 1.48 ERA and 99 strikeouts in 84.2 innings, all the while saving his best performance for last.

Last Thursday night, driving home from Montgomery, Heaps talked about Greenhill’s place among the all-time greats.

“If there’s ever been a pitcher in the history of Russellville baseball better than him….I’ll just say, I doubt that.”

It seems safe to assume that Greenhill’s name will be called in the MLB Amateur Draft this June; the only questions are how early and whether or not he can be enticed to forego the scholarship offer from Auburn University that he signed last November. Either way, he figures to come out a winner yet again.

“Oh yeah, those are both really good options,” Greenhill said. “I’ll just do a lot of praying. I know God will lead me down the right path.”

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