Coming into the home stretch of a season filled with inconsistency, not just weather-wise, but with the team’s play as well, the talented DeWitt Clinton High School varsity baseball team is looking to secure a playoff berth in the PSAL Championship.

The Governors have not only been inconsistent from game to game, but often within the same game.

“We can play six great innings but have a bad inning, can drop easy pop ups, have mental errors,” said Coach Dennis D’Alessandro. He feels the team is “schizophrenic” and Mother Nature has not cooperated either. It’s hard to build momentum when a handful of games have already been missed because of inclement weather.

As of Tuesday, May 17, the Governors were 8 – 5, good for third place in the Bronx A East Division, which D’Alessandro calls “arguably the best in the city…every [game], there’s a chance for a slugfest.”

Although the team has had its stretches of bad play, there have been some memorable wins as well. Clinton handed Lehman High School its first loss of the season when they were undefeated at 5 – 0. The Governors were down four runs in the seventh inning before mounting a comeback. There’s a healthy rivalry between the two schools and D’Alessandro wouldn’t mind “playing an entire schedule just against them.”

Another special win came this past Friday against Evander Childs Campus when Clinton was down five runs, but was able to pull off a walk-off win in a most unlikely fashion: a suicide squeeze play.

Even though D’Alessandro doesn’t feel his team has been able to put it all together, with 32 teams able to qualify for the playoffs, he expects to see his team in the playoffs.

Talent-wise, he says, this is the best team he’s had in his five years as coach at Clinton. In order to make a deep run and play for the city championship at Keyspan Park in Brooklyn, he will have to rely on a core of senior players including CF Joaquin Dejesus, P Jean Allende, RF Julian Burgos and SS Melvin Mercedes, who D’Alessandro calls “a generational high school player and [you] won’t see another player like him come through in 10 to 15 years.”