HUNTSVILLE - Standing along the railing of the first-base dugout at the Lee High School baseball field in Huntsville on Monday night, Caden Parker was asked how it felt to have his first career playoff start behind him.
The junior righthander, who had just struck out a season-high eight batters in six innings of one-run ball to pitch the Golden Tigers past Lee 13-1 and into the Class 5A quarterfinals, merely shrugged.
“Just another game,” he said.
Perhaps somewhat skeptical of Parker’s super-chill reply, another sports writer asked the logical follow-up question. Is it really that simple?
For Parker, it just might be.
“He’s got a little swag about him,” head coach Chris Heaps said. “He’s been telling me since yesterday, ‘I got this, Coach. Don’t worry. I got this.’”
Because the start of the second-round series was pushed back from Friday to Saturday due to wet field conditions, the two teams got a rare day off between Game 2 [which Russellville won 10-2 to stave off elimination following a 3-2 loss in the opener] and Game 3. Heaps took advantage of the Sunday respite to further prepare the Golden Tigers for their first winner-take-all playoff game in an opponent’s home stadium since their current run of three consecutive state titles began in 2015. [Russellville had been pushed to a third and decisive game just three times over its previous three championship runs, once at home and twice in Montgomery.]
“We practiced for three hours,” senior Noah Gist said. “We scrimmaged. A lot.”
The day off also gave Parker, who went 5-2 during the regular season with a 2.02 ERA but hadn’t pitched in an actual game since April 12, a little extra time to contemplate the burden of being a Game 3 starter in the postseason. A loss would be nothing less than a season-ender for Russellville, not to mention a career-ender for the team’s 11 seniors and a dynasty-ender for a program seeking to become the first in AHSAA history to win four straight Class 5A championships.
If the weight of all that responsibility—or the prospect of going pitch for pitch with Lee ace Ludany Rodriguez—caused Parker any stress, he certainly didn’t show it.
“I just wanted to come out and pitch like I always pitch,” he said. “Throw strikes, keep the ball down, get some groundballs. My defense did a great job today. I have a lot of faith in those guys. It doesn’t matter if they make zero errors or six errors—I trust them.”
Unlike Rodriguez, who had struck out a staggering 73 batters in just 43 innings through Sunday, Parker succeeds with a pitch-to-contact approach that relies heavily on the guys behind him making plays. In his two best outings of the season (3-0 wins over Hartselle and Arab a week apart in late March), Parker struck out exactly one batter in 13 innings of work. He also walked just one and held the Tigers and the Knights to a total of five hits while throwing 81 of his 122 pitches for strikes (a stellar rate of 66 percent) and getting groundball outs by the bushel.
He filled up the zone again on Monday night at Lee, issuing only one free pass and throwing 69 of his 108 pitches for strikes. He also induced something close to his usual allotment of groundballs, including two that resulted in key double plays—one in the bottom of the first after Lee’s first two batters of the game had singled, and another in the bottom of the fourth after he plunked Jackson West with a two-strike pitch to start the inning.
But Monday’s start was different for Parker in one respect—those eight strikeouts, one more than he had in his first start of the season way back on February 22 at Haleyville. He fanned three hitters in the bottom of the second, including leadoff man Noah Watkins with two down and the bases loaded in a 2-0 game, and then struck out the side in his final inning, the bottom of the sixth.
So where did all those K’s come from?
“My curveball was working tonight,” said Parker, who now has 38 strikeouts on the season in 50.2 innings. “Coach [Eli] Fuller did a good job of getting us ahead with the fastball, and Briles [Hunter, the team’s junior catcher] always does a good job framing pitches and getting me some strikes on pitches that might not be strikes.”
While Parker (6-2) was missing bats left and right (pun intended), Rodriguez was laboring. The senior lefty dominated Guntersville in Game 3 of the Generals’ first-round series, striking out 12 and giving up only three hits in a 2-1 win, but the Golden Tigers (26-14) had his number from the get-go on Monday. They scored single runs off him in the first and second innings and then chased him with four straight two-out hits in the third, opening up a 6-0 lead.
The plan of attack was to…well…not attack.
“We wanted to be patient and put the ball in play,” said Gist, who scored the Golden Tigers’ first run of the night, knocked in their second and finished 2-for-3 with a walk in the leadoff spot. “Our goal was to make him work, make him throw strikes. Coach Heaps kept telling us after we lost Game 1, ‘Calm down, it’s baseball.’ We didn’t want to try and take the game to them. When you do that, you get over-anxious and you start getting yourself out.
“We wanted to let the game come to us.”
With that in mind, Gist led off the top of the first on Monday by drawing a walk, his team-leading 25th of the season. Rudy Fernandez got into a two-strike count but lined a breaking ball from Rodriguez into left field for a single. Two outs later, with runners at second and third, Rodriguez stumbled and nearly fell during his stride toward the plate on a pitch that never came to Houston Kitterman, committing a balk that allowed Gist to score the game’s first run.
Parker allowed back-to-back singles to start the bottom of the first, but senior second baseman Brock Malone turned a sharp groundball by Rodriguez into a 4-6-3 double-play that helped tidy up what could have become a messy inning. The Golden Tigers continued to grind away in the top of the second, loading the bases on walks to Kitterman and T.B. Scott sandwiched around a single by Devin Buckhalter.
Gist came to the plate with two outs and worked the count to 3-and-1 before taking a called strike on a borderline pitch that may or may not have grabbed the outside corner.
“I thought it was ball four,” Gist said, “but you have to move on to the next pitch. That [strike two] pitch wasn’t in my future any more. I put it out of my mind. I just looked at my bat and said, ‘Confidence,’ and got back in there.”
Rodriguez grooved a 3-2 fastball right over the heart of the plate, and Gist didn’t miss it. He hit a hard liner right back through box and into centerfield, chasing home Kitterman and Buckhalter on what appeared to be a two-run single. The Generals appealed, however, and Buckhalter was ruled out for apparently failing to touch home plate. His run didn’t count, but Russellville still led 2-0.
Parker got the pivotal strikeout of Watkins to escape a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the second, and the Golden Tigers took the wind out of Lee’s sails with a two-out rally against Rodriguez in the third. Landon Ezzell was on first when Kitterman singled, and Malone followed with a double down the right-field line to bring home pinch-runner Will Rogers and make it 3-0. Buckhalter drove in Kitterman with an infield hit, and Malone scored on a wild pitch. Briles then chased Rodriguez with an RBI single that brought home Buckhalter to make it 6-0.
Parker struck out two more batters in the bottom of the third, stranding a pair of runners, and then got another 4-6-3 double-play courtesy of middle infielders Malone and Fernandez in a scoreless fourth. Parker pitched around a leadoff single by Watkins in the bottom of the fifth, and Russellville put the game away with another four-run rally in the top of the sixth. Gist and Fernandez both singled and scored in the inning, Parker hit a sacrifice fly, Malone had an RBI single, and Ezzell came home when Buckhalter reached on an error to make it 10-0.
On the verge of being run-ruled, Lee (18-13) put together three singles in the bottom of the sixth to get a run on the board and extend the game, though Parker did strike out the side. Russellville got the final three of its 16 hits on the night in the top of the seventh, including a mammoth pinch-hit home run to right-center by Jeff Lloyd and an RBI double by Ezzell down the third-base line. Ezzell scored the final run of the night when Nick Smith reached on an infield single, making it 13-1.
Parker gave way in the bottom of the seventh to freshman Gordon White, who retired Lee’s two-three-four hitters in order to finish off the Golden Tigers’ 34th win in 38 playoff games since 2015. Next up is a home series this weekend with Area 11 runner-up Springville (24-11).
Aside from Gist, six other players had two hits for Russellville on Monday. Fernandez was 2-for-5 with a run, and Ezzell went 2-for-5 with two RBIs and two runs scored. Kitterman went 2-for-3 with two runs and two walks, and Malone was 2-for-5 with a double and two RBIs. Buckhalter was 2-for-4 with a run and a stolen base, and Briles went 2-for-4 with an RBI.
After dropping Saturday’s series opener 3-2 in eight innings, the Golden Tigers out-scored Lee 23-3 over the course of two elimination games to keep their four-peat hopes alive.
“There might have been a little bit of panic,” Gist confessed, “but we just kept going back to what Coach Heaps told us. ‘Calm down, it’s baseball.’ Really, I think losing that first game just made us mad.”
