Published: June 30, 2009 04:36 pm      

Forrest sees a little Lou in Graham

Although both men might appreciate the comparison, Travis Graham will never be confused with Lou Pinella — at least not by a casual observer.

Graham, Ada’s young American Legion baseball coach, comes off immediately as soft-spoken and polite. Pinella, on the other hand, is known as one of the most volatile, explosive managers in baseball history, a guy mentioned in the same breath with such old-school firebrands as Leo Durocher, Billy Martin and Earl Weaver.

But Sunday evening at Cougar Field, Graham showed he has a little Pinella in his make-up. On top of everything else — both good and bad — that can be said about Sweet Lou, he is an outstanding baseball man and a master psycholigist who overachieved as a player and always seems to bring out the best in the men who play for him.

In the 14 months since he brought American Legion baseball back to the Ada area, Graham has shown some of the same qualities. And, while he has rarely had to raise his voice to get his point across, he makes just enough noise to get the attention of his players; as a result, those players have competed with — and consistently beaten — some of the top Legion teams in Oklahoma during Graham’s tenure.

Graham’s Post 72 Braves entered Sunday’s rematch with Bartlesville (a team that beat them, 14-11, in the season opener last month) having won 11 straight games and 21 of their last 24 to improve to 21-8 on the season. They had rallied from huge deficits to twice extend the winning streak, their bats had been churning out runs at a dizzying pace, and their pitching staff had proven itself to be much deeper than the one that carried Graham’s first Post 72 squad to the Legion state tournament last summer.

But in the seventh inning of Sunday’s nine-inning contest, the Braves — playing their fourth game in four days — seemed to need a spark. Despite outhitting Bartlesville by a wide margin (18-9 by game’s end), Graham’s troops hadn’t been able to capitalize on several scoring opportunities. The visiting Indians had just trimmed Ada’s lead to 5-4 on a leadoff homer by Michael Mueller in the top of the seventh, and Post 72 starting pitcher David Cagle didn’t seem to be getting any love at all from the home plate umpire.

Depending on your point of view, Cagle just missed with back-to-back breaking pitches before he came back over the plate with a fastball that Mueller lined over the fence in right field. One batter later, Graham was out on the field and, for one of the few times this season, he was raising his voice. He didn’t come out to plead his case with the man behind the plate; instead, he came out with the express purpose of being ejected.

It took awhile, but after repeatedly questioning the umpire’s competency and work ethic, Graham was tossed. As he left the field, he yelled at Cagle, “Do a job!”. Then he turned back toward home plate and gave the umpire one last parting shot: “And you do YOUR job!”

Cagle didn’t finish the inning, but he left with the lead — a lead that was surrendered by Jon Gray in the top of the eighth as the Indians tied the game. The Braves then squandered a huge scoring chance in the bottom of the eighth, and a controversial (but probably correct) runner interference call from the base umpire in the top of the ninth — one of several that brought the wrath of the Bartlesville faithful down on the men in blue in the late innings — helped preserve the tie.

But in the bottom of the ninth, the Braves finally produced the game-winning run on a long single by winning pitcher Chad Woods to score one of the team’s unsung heroes, Matt Johnson, and end a game that had a little bit of everything.

Five of Bartlesville’s nine hits went for extra bases, including homers by Mueller, Scott Hall and Mark LeMaster. Hall’s blast gave the Indians a short-lived 1-0 first-inning lead, and LeMaster’s opposite-field shot in the fourth made it 4-3. Ada got a homer from Jon Ervin and doubles from Johnson, Robert Thomas and Randy McCurry, and, along with Johnson, both Ervin and McCurry figured in unusual plays on defense.

Colton Porter led off the Bartlesville third inning with a double and was at third with one out when Cagle — who had been touched for seven runs in less than two innings as the emergency starter in the first meeting between the two teams but had won a staff-best six decisions in a row since — threw a 2-2 pitch past Daniel Hayes for the second out. After Cagle hit Andrew Ballinger, the Indians tried to steal a run, with Ballinger breaking for second on a 1-1 pitch on the back end of a delayed double steal.

But McCurry, the Ada shortstop and the team leader in home runs with nine this summer, moved toward the plate to take the throw from Ada catcher Riley Keith and whipped a perfect strike back to Keith in plenty of time to retire Porter and end the threat.

The Indians also ran themselves out of a potential big inning in the eighth, when for the second time this season Ervin (the Ada third baseman) and Keith sniffed out a suicide squeeze with Gray on the mound. After Gray walked Drew Anthony and surrendered singles to LeMaster and Mueller that produced the tying run and left Indians at first and third with just one out, Ervin heard the Bartlesville coaches discussing the squeeze play and relayed the information to Keith, who called for a pitchout on the first pitch to Hall. The former Ada High catcher was waiting when LeMaster chugged home, and he held onto the ball despite a bone-jarring collision that got LeMaster ejected from the game.

“It was clean,” Keith said of LeMaster’s slide afterward. “He didn’t lower his shoulder or anything, and I told him that later.”

Perhaps the strangest fact to come out of Sunday’s nail-biter was that the Braves scored just six runs. Thomas and Jeremy Stein — the 1-2 hitters in the batting order — had four hits apiece, and Keith, Johnson and Ervin — hitting in the 3-5-6 holes — were a combined 7-for-14, which should have been a formula for an offensive explosion.

But on a night when, despite their inability to produce a lot of big hits, the Braves did enough little things right defensively and on the mound to hang around long enough for Woods to score Johnson with the game winner. And that is a tribute to the job Graham and his coaching staff have done this summer.

Big bats throughout the lineup, a solid defense and a deep, talented pitching staff are all ingredients for making any coach look good. Graham, though, has added a little bit of his own fuel to the fire propelling his team to a probable high seed in the Legion playoffs in August, and knowing exactly when to stoke the coals can be just as important as all the other little things that turn winning coaches into champions.