RUSSELLVILLE - A guest being given a guided tour of the Russellville baseball facility earlier this week bumped into head coach Chris Heaps and mentioned that he wouldn’t mind watching the Golden Tigers take batting practice.
“Batting practice?” Heaps replied in mock confusion. “Batting practice is overrated. We’re about to take an hour-and-a-half of groundballs.”
Heaps was being facetious—maybe not about the 90-minute defensive workout he had planned but certainly about the relative unimportance of BP. Still, beneath the good humor was a bedrock principle near and dear to the heart of his coaching philosophy.
Heaps has been a part of seven state championship teams (one at Hartselle as a senior second baseman in 1990, three with the Tigers as an assistant coach under William Booth and three more as a head coach at RHS), and all seven of those teams had at least one thing in common: They pitched, and they played defense.
“Hitting comes and goes,” Heaps said. “But pitching and defense had better be pillars of your program.”
Hitting most definitely came for the Golden Tigers in Tuesday’s Class 5A, Area 16 opener in Moulton, when they blasted three home runs with the wind blowing out at H.A. Alexander Park and hung multiple crooked numbers on Lawrence County in a 15-0 rout. Hitting most definitely went for the Golden Tigers on Thursday when the series shifted to Russellville Baseball Stadium, where a stiff wind was blowing in and Red Devil ace Cole Turner—who had allowed a total of just two earned runs in his first four starts—was dealing on the mound.
“Outstanding,” Heaps said of Turner’s performance in Thursday’s opener, the all-important second game of the series. “He’s a strike-thrower, a locater. It seemed like he threw about 85 percent strikes. If you throw 70 percent strikes, how many guys are you gonna walk? Probably none.”
Turner issued just one free pass—an intentional walk to the red-hot Houston Kitterman with runners at first and second and two outs in the bottom of the sixth—and held Russellville to just three hits and no runs through six innings. It was exactly the kind of game Heaps had in mind when he convened a team meeting this past Sunday, at which the primary topics were—you guessed it—pitching and defense.
“We can’t always rely on out-hitting our pitching and out-hitting our mistakes,” said Heaps, whose team had started to swing the bats better coming into the Lawrence County series following a slow start at the plate.
Heaps is a firm believer that a team is good at what it emphasizes, and there was at least one clear point of emphasis at Sunday’s meeting.
“Throwing first-pitch strikes,” Heaps said. “When we throw a first-pitch strike, we only walk people about six percent of the time. So we basically eliminate walks when we throw first-pitch strikes. And if you eliminate walks and don’t make errors, you force the other team to beat you, rather than you beating yourself.”
Rudy Fernandez, Russellville’s No. 2 starter, was evidently all-ears at Sunday’s pow-wow. Fernandez, for whom command of the strike zone is ordinarily a strength, was coming off a rough outing the previous week, when he walked three batters, hit one and failed to get out of the second inning in a loss to Austin. Matched up against Turner on Thursday, Fernandez got back in the saddle and then some.
The senior right-hander filled up the zone all day, tossing seven innings of two-hit, six-strikeout ball and dueling Turner zero for zero. The Red Devils blinked first in the bottom of the seventh when Russellville senior Tom Barkley Scott beat out an infield hit and eventually scored on Caden Parker’s walk-off sacrifice fly, giving the Golden Tigers a 1-0 win that could hardly have been more different than Tuesday’s Game 1 romp.
“They had a very good pitcher on the mound today,” Fernandez said, “so we knew it was gonna be a lot tougher. I was expecting a pitcher’s battle. When it’s going like that, you just have to take it pitch by pitch, keep executing and keep doing what you can to give your team a chance to win.”
Fernandez (2-1 this season and now 10-1 in his varsity career) certainly did that, getting nine groundball outs to go along with his season-high six K’s and facing just two batters over the minimum.
“Rudy pitched a great game,” Heaps said afterward. “It wouldn’t have mattered who we were playing tonight—they would have had a hard time with Rudy. He was able to throw his curveball for strikes, which was key. He threw really well for us at times last year, when he was 8-0, but early this year it kind of seemed like he’d been getting in his own way mentally a little bit. Something would happen that, as a senior, he ought to be able to bounce back from, but he’d have a tough time getting past it.
“That’s what we told him coming into today—just get out of his own way from a mental standpoint.”
Of the 89 pitches Fernandez threw on Thursday, 62 were in the zone—a strike rate right at Heaps’ target mark of 70 percent. The credit for that, Heaps said, doesn’t go to the pitcher alone.
“There’s a reason Hunter Briles has been behind the plate for us just about every game lately,” Heaps said, referring to his junior catcher. “The difference between throwing 70 percent strikes and throwing 48 percent strikes is about one pitch per batter, and Hunter does a great job of getting us that one pitch. He’s a good framer.
“There are three pillars to being a great catcher. Receiving comes first, and then blocking is a distant second. Then, at a distant third, is throwing. Hunter’s a great receiver, and that’s the most important thing a catcher can do.”
Fernandez fell behind leadoff man Brayden Proctor 3-0 to start the game before retiring him on a pop-up. He breezed through the first two innings, six up and six down, and later had a stretch where he set down nine straight batters.
“I was just trying to get ahead with the fastball and then get some swings and misses with my curveball,” said Fernandez, who did indeed finish off five of his six strikeouts with a breaking ball. “It’s about executing pitches and hitting your spots.”
In the one inning where Fernandez struggled to hit his spots, that other championship program pillar—excellent defense—rode to the rescue. Fernandez started the top of the third by hitting Chandler Daniel with a pitch and then walking No. 8 hitter Braden Clement. No. 9 man Hunter White tried to bunt the runners over, but Daniel took off for third on a ball in the dirt and was cut down by Briles for the first out.
Clement moved to second on the play, and then White hit a sharp grounder up the middle that was ticketed for center field. Junior shortstop Caden Parker ranged far to his left and flagged the ball down near the second-base bag, turning a likely go-ahead RBI single into a not-as-easy-as-it-looked 6-3 putout. With Clement at third, Fernandez struck out Proctor on a curveball to end the threat and keep it a scoreless game.
After Turner retired Russellville (11-4, 2-0) in order in the bottom of the third, Chip Proctor led off the Lawrence County fourth with a single to left, the first hit of the game for the Red Devils (11-3, 0-2). Proctor moved to second on a bunt by Braxton Terry but then got a little too greedy and tried to take third as well. First baseman Jeff Lloyd fired a strike across the diamond to Kitterman, who tagged out Proctor to complete the 1-3-5 double-play and end the inning.
Turner pitched around a two-out single by Kitterman in the bottom of the fourth, and senior second baseman Brock Malone flawlessly handled three groundballs for the Golden Tigers in the top of the fifth. Turner got Russellville in order in the bottom of the inning, and Fernandez followed suit in the Lawrence County sixth.
Turner was cruising along until senior leadoff man Noah Gist singled with one out in the bottom of the sixth. Fernandez flied to center for the second out, and then Gist stole second to put the go-ahead run in scoring position. Turner hit Landon Ezzell with a pitch, and then Lawrence County made the unusual decision to intentionally walk Kitterman—who was 4-for-6 in the series at the time with two home runs—with runners at first and second.
“That,” Heaps said after the game, “showed a lot of respect.”
The move nearly backfired when Malone drove a ball into the gap in right-center, but rightfielder Ashton Allen tracked it down for the third out, and the scoreless duel continued. Fernandez struck out Chip Proctor to start the seventh, but Terry followed with a double down the left-field line. At that point, Heaps came out of the dugout to make a change—but not on the mound, where Fernandez wasn’t going anywhere.
“Coach told me, ‘Whatever you’re doing, just keep doing it,’” Fernandez said after the game. “I told him, ‘I got this guy, Coach. I’ll get us out of this.’”
Heaps brought Jaret Ward into the game to take over in left field for Gist, who has been dealing with shoulder issues that have affected his throwing. With the go-ahead run at second base, Heaps wasn’t taking any chances.
“Noah has had some shoulder problems,” the coach said, “and Jaret’s a stronger arm and an accurate thrower. We didn’t want to not make a move there and see it get us beat.”
Fernandez rendered the move moot, retiring cleanup hitter Dalton Hill on a pop to third and then getting Allen on a grounder to third to end the inning. Scott then legged out an infield single to start the bottom of the seventh, and Devin Buckhalter pushed a perfect bunt to the right side. Turner fielded it on the move, but his throw to first got by Clement for an error and allowed the runners to move up to second and third.
Parker nearly won the game with a suicide squeeze bunt, but the ball rolled inches foul up the first-base line. He got the job done in the end with a fly ball to left, chasing home Scott with the only run of the game and giving the Golden Tigers an all-important two-game sweep.
“It’s big for us to beat a good team like that to start off area play,” Fernandez said. “We just have to keep working and keep getting ready for the next team.”
Russellville won’t begin its next area series until April 3 at Brooks, but with one week of area play in the books the Golden Tigers’ pitching certainly seems to be in postseason form. Parker (3-0) struck out four and allowed only three hits in five shutout innings in Thursday’s nightcap (another 1-0 win), extending his streak to 15.2 innings to start the season without allowing an earned run—impressive, to be sure, but only the second-best such streak on the staff. Ezzell, the team’s senior ace, has not given up an earned run in 19 innings this season and is 4-0 with 20 strikeouts and only six hits allowed.
Ezzell, Fernandez, Parker and reliever Jaret Ward combined to throw 19 scoreless innings in the Lawrence County series, meaning that the Golden Tigers haven’t given up a run since their Sunday meeting.
Maybe Heaps was right. Maybe batting practice is overrated.
