Modest Harris Guides Granada Hills to Title

One would not know it by talking to him, but Eric Harris was the Granada Hills pitcher who threw a four-hit shutout that boosted his team to a 4-0 win over Westchester in the championship game of the Holt-Goodman tournament Tuesday at Birmingham High.

While reporters tried to coax Harris to explain his mastery of the flustered Comets, Harris was busy talking about his catcher, Nile Bloom.

“I owe a lot to my catcher,” Harris said. “He makes me work a lot harder and keeps my intensity level high.”

Harris also was busy crediting his coach, Darryl Stroh.

“Coach gives me a lot of drive,” he said.

And he was also busy chatting up his team’s defense.

“Our defense is the backbone of my pitching,” he said. “This is the best infield in the Valley, I think, and they deserve a lot of the credit.

The way Harris was talking, he sounded as if the alignment of the planets had more to do with his pitching than himself. But after he struck out seven and walked just three, it was the Comets who were left seeing stars.

Harris (3-0), a right-hander, was in only one true jam, that coming in the top of the second when Westchester loaded the bases with one out. But Westchester’s Stephen Williams hit into a double play and Westchester’s hopes of touching up Harris dimmed.

Westchester received strong pitching from odd sources. Coach Ron Kasparian’s pitching staff had been depleted in the tournament grind so he went with what he called “team pitching”. Translation: Bill Diede, David Sanchez and Herb Grady--three regular infielders--each pitched two innings.

The strategy worked quite well through four innings as Granada Hills (7-0) could only muster one unearned run. Grady, who was playing third base, committed a fielding error that allowed Jeremy Leach to reach first on a bases-empty, two-out ground ball. Leach advanced to second on a wild pitch and scored when Grady fielded a bunt by Bloom and threw down the right-field line for another error.

In the bottom of the fifth, Grady committed another throwing error at third on a routine ground ball by Chris Murphy. The error put Murphy on second base and he scored one out later on a single to left by Steve Kovacic.

In the same inning, Darryl Stephenson hit a two-run home run to left field off David Sanchez, his second of the tournament, and Granada Hills was safe with a 4-0 lead.

After Stephenson’s home run, Harris pitched his two strongest innings, striking out three of the last six batters and yielding just a pop-fly double that right-fielder Leach lost in the sun. In fact, only one of the four hits that Harris allowed was impressive--two were aided by the sun and one was an infield chopper.

But try telling Harris that. He will probably just say it was something in the air.