A few thoughts from a pretty entertaining Class A Legion baseball state tournament:

n I have no idea how Dickinson will fare at the Central Plains Regional, but I'm willing to bet the Roughriders score some runs.

The top half of the Roughriders order was virtually unstoppable last week. Dickinson's Eric Seiler, Stephen Laylock, Cole Frenzel, Ben Herauf and Tyler Steffan were on base constantly, and the result was a second straight state title.

Herauf grabbed most of the headlines, and deservedly so. The tournament MVP hit a two-run game-winning homer against Minot to put the Roughriders into the championship game, then a championship-winning grand slam against Fargo.

Herauf hit five homers and knocked in a mind-boggling 22 runs, 19 in his last three games. Perhaps even more impressive was his .741 on-base percentage.

Frenzel, the Texas Rangers' draft pick, may have been even better than that over the first four games of the tournament. Heading into the championship game, he had reached base safely 16 times in 19 trips to the plate, or an .842 OBP. That number dropped to a mere .760 for the tournament.

Laylock wasn't too shabby, either, getting on at a .577 clip. No wonder then that Herauf, Frenzel and Steffan combined for 50 RBIs on the tourney.

Think about that. That's 10 per game, just from three guys.

The Roughriders did their namesake, Teddy Roosevelt, proud, because they certainly carry some pretty big sticks.

n It's time to shorten Legion tournament games to seven innings. If the insistence on nine comes from the national level, it should be changed there, too.

There simply isn't enough pitching to go around. Need proof? The average offensive output was 17.6 runs scored in each game last week.

But more important than that, the nine-inning format makes it too tempting for coaches to overwork their best pitchers. That puts those pitchers at risk for serious injuries.

The American Sports Medicine Institute recommends a pitch count of no more than 106 for players ages 17 and 18. I guarantee there were many pitchers who went zooming by that mark this weekend one reportedly hit 170.

Hopefully none of them is the worse for wear. Pitch counts are an inexact science to be sure, but studies have shown that past a certain fatigue level, the chance of injury goes up significantly with each extra pitch. And it's not worth the risk.

The teams play seven innings all year long. There is no reason for the tournament games to be any different.

n Finally, enough with the bunting.

It's not that teams should never sacrifice. It's just that they should do so very sparingly in situations when they are playing for one run because that's what it will likely take to win the game. Maybe sometimes with a really weak hitter at the plate, or somebody who has a reasonable chance to beat it out.

There was one game in the tournament where a team tried to sacrifice in the first inning with it's No. 3 hitter. Seriously.

That makes no sense in virtually any context, but especially not in a tournament where teams are averaging a run scored every inning.

Don't give away outs! It's simple. They are a baseball team's most precious commodity, and it's been proven conclusively that giving them away is almost always a self-defeating strategy.

(Lou Babiarz is the Tribune sports editor.)