The Mattituck baseball team has endured a difficult season, winning only one game, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm offirst-year head coachJoe Tardif.

He keeps it upbeat, with positive reinforcement to his squad.

“We’ve got to play winning baseball.”

Tardif was hoping the Tuckers would earn their second win in a Suffolk County League VII home game against Elwood-John Glenn on Friday, May 1, but they dropped a 3-0 decision.

“For the situation we’re in and the program that we have, I stress the little things,” he said. “I stress the fundamentals. Those are the things that are going to close the gap between us and the teams who are a little bit stronger than we are. In a seven-inning game, you don’t have much time to make up for mistakes. Today, for example, we had four missed bunt attempts. We got picked off, had a couple lapses defensively. You can’t do those things. You got to be almost perfect.”

Tardif is considered one of the best athletes to come out of Mattituck. He was a member of two state championship teams (soccer and baseball) during the 2014-15 academic year. He was named the state Class B baseball player of the year and was twice selected as Mattituck’sboys athlete of the yearby The Suffolk Times.

“I talked to them in the beginning of the year and reminded them that baseball is a hard sport,” he said. “It’s very hard. It’s a sport you fail at more times than not. You need to have a certain mindset to play it. You need to have a short memory. A strikeout isn’t, ‘Oh, woe is me.’ It’s, ‘Okay, I’m going to get the next one.’ That’s the mindset. It’s next play, next pitch, next opportunity to be successful.”

It was anyone’s game through five innings as sophomore right-hander Brayden Kruk and Glenn’s Connor Bletsch tussled in aclassic pitcher’s duel.

Kruk fanned the first four batters and finished with 10 strikeouts over 5 1/3 innings.

“I was able to locate my fastball on the outside corner very well,” he said. “I was also able to locate my slider. Especially with either a 2-2 or 3-2 count, I was able to drop it in there for a strike as well as throw it down when I needed to get a strike.”

Source: The Suffolk Times