By Jason Avery
News-Times Staff
After being idle for the bulk of July, the El Dorado Oilers return to the diamond in hopes of making a lengthy postseason run.
The Oilers (12-12-1) will take on Texarkana at 5:30 p.m. today in the opening round of the Arkansas American Legion AAA Area 4 Zone Tournament at Sheridan.
The Oilers need to finish either first or second in the double elimination tournament to qualify for the state tournament.
Heading into today’s game, the Oilers have played only three games in the last two weeks, recording a sweep of Arkadelphia on July 9 in their final games of the regular season.
Oilers coach Greg Harrison said the team has been working on their defense in practices leading up to the tournament.
“We had some practices leading up to it,” Harrison said. “We want to make sure we go with fresh arms and fresh legs. We’ve worked on our defense in situational matters, especially with runners on base. We’ve been fine-tuning our defense and have gone over a few things that we need to know before we get the ball and making sure that we sharpen up those rough edges that we have.”
Harrison said the Oilers have battled all season long no matter the circumstances.
“One thing that has stood out for us is that is whenever it’s come to tournaments, we’ve gotten down a few times, but we’ve never given up,” Harrison said. “It’s crazy, but a lot of our better innings at the plate have come in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings. We have that never-give-up mentality. We consider that we’re never out of the game regardless of the situation.”
That mantra was showcased against Arkadelphia.
In the opener, the Oilers scored four runs in the bottom of the sixth to erase a 6-4 deficit en route to an 8-6 win.
“We were down twice in the game,” Harrison said. “We kept the hitting the ball and would get a few runners across the plate to take the lead. That happened on a few occasions. We were able to take the lead in the latter innings and hang on to it at the end. One thing that helped us out compared to many games in the past is we were able to hit the ball, play defense and throw strikes.”
As far as Texarkana is concerned, the teams were due to meet, but Texarkana wound up forfeiting both games that counted in the zone standings.
“We kind of have an idea of what to expect from them,” Harrison said. “But at the same time, it’s a different mentality from years past whenever you faced Texarkana, because right now, from what I’ve been hearing, they’ve been having trouble keeping enough players.
“Of course, I don’t know if that’s an after Fourth of July thing. You always tend to have a lull, and there’s a few teams even from what we found in Dixie and Babe Ruth where a lot of players from even really good teams will fail to show back up after the Fourth of July.
“It’s similar when we were playing Camden a couple of weeks ago where we had a junior and senior game. They had their junior state tournament coming up that weekend.
“We’re playing that Thursday, and they had four players quit right before their state tournament. They were going into their state tournament with 10 ballplayers.
“There’s things that happen for a number of different reasons, injuries, planned vacations, church trips, but it’s always good to try and have a core group of players that you know you can depend on that will be there for you.”
If there is a favorite to win the tournament, Harrison said Sheridan, the No. 1 seed, is it.
“Sheridan is the team to beat this year,” Harrison said. “If you look at a lot of their ballplayers, many of them have played for multiple state championships while they were in high school at Sheridan, so we know they will be loaded.
“They’re definitely the team to beat, but the interesting thing about the zone tournament is we have to be one of the top two. Friday is a key game for us. If we can get a ‘W’ on Friday, we’ll be in the driver’s seat for that opportunity.”