Rye High School’s varsity baseball team has been on something of a rollercoaster ride so far this season, but with the schedule ahead filled with difficult opponents, the players will need something that has eluded them so far: stability and consistency.

The ride started out fine, with back-to-back wins over Ardsley and Eastchester. In the first game, four players, including Tommy Broderick, A.J. Miller, James Kennedy, and Nolan Hutson, recorded multiple hits in a 12-3 victory over the Panthers on April 10, while sophomores Jamie Morris and Jackson Pineault combined for five RBIs.

For the second game, they returned home to Disbrow Park on April 16 to be greeted by a new bleacher section behind home plate – and a dominating performance from senior pitcher Shephard Griffiths, one worthy of the enhanced seating arrangements. Griffiths pitched arguably the best game of his high school career, striking out 14 batters over seven innings and allowing just one hit in the Garnets’ 4-1 win. He even struck out the side in the final inning to close out the game.

“With the new stands, the atmosphere at Disbrow was better than ever,” Griffiths said. “I was able to build off of that and get to a place where I felt unstoppable.” He retired 12 batters in a row to finish the game and lowered his ERA to 0.60 following the victory.

But then the season’s momentum shifted, and the Garnets lost back-to-back away games against Eastchester and Yorktown to close out their fourth week. The biggest concern: their defense, which ran up a total of nine errors during the two games. The defen- sive lapses were key in the 7-4 loss to Eastchester – four of the seven runs allowed by the Garnets were unearned. And against Yorktown on April 20, the team made five errors in the first five innings, even as its top six hitters in the starting lineup went a combined 0 for 15 against Yorktown pitchers Derek Patrissi and Ryan DiNapoli, who held the Garnets to three hits in the 6-2 Rye loss.

For RHS Coach Mike Bruno, the difference between each set of games was in the execution of basic things. “The past four games were a bit of a mixed bag: The two wins we had we played well enough to win, but the second game versus Eastchester and the game versus Yorktown we just let get away from us early, not playing fundamentally clean ball.”

The Garnets, now seventh in the region’s Section 1 Class A standings, need to get off the rollercoaster if they are to have a chance to win their league title and host a home playoff game next month. Upcoming games include Pelham, Ardsley, and Harrison, all of whom have win-loss records above .500 so far. While every team in Class A will make the postseason, Rye will need to win the majority of its final 11 games to finish among the top eight, which would allow them to host their first playoff game at Disbrow in pursuit of this year’s Section 1 championship.

Bruno said the time to turn the corner is now, especially if the team wants to win their league title in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 2017-2018. “We can really put ourselves in a great position to win the league or create a really uphill battle for the rest of the year,” he said. “We just need to get back to playing fundamentally sound baseball, and the rest will take care of itself.”