May 19, 2021 3 min read

McMURRAY – In the first game of Wednesday’s WPIAL baseball tripleheader at Peters Township’s Peterswood Park, West Greene won its first playoff game in school history.

Chartiers-Houston has won baseball playoff games before, but none recently. The Bucs fixed that in game No. 2.

Behind the left arm of Matt Rieger, and aided by mistakes from Riverside’s defense, No.6 Chartiers-Houston did what it needed to do and took care of No. 11 Riverside, 3-0.

“Matt Rieger gave us another clutch performance,” Char-Houston coach Andy Manion said. “He started to tire maybe in the fourth inning, and said, ‘I can give you another one,’ and then in the fifth, said ‘I can give you another one.'”

Rieger pitched six shutout innings before giving way to Jimmy Sadler, who escaped a bases-loaded jam in the seventh to close it out. It was Rieger’s first playoff game on the mound, but he wasn’t nervous.

Instead, he focused on pitching to contact, only striking out one batter, but getting outs by not being afraid to let hitters put the ball in play.

“Once I started getting kids to pop up and ground out, it was good,” Rieger said.

Despite his pitch count only being at a manageable 77, Rieger felt he had run his course after the sixth.

“I was out of steam,” Rieger said. “I didn’t want to go any further and hurt myself. I started feeling it, so I shut down. I didn’t want to hurt myself or hurt my team at that point.”

The Bucs (15-3) got the scoring started in the bottom of the first when Austin Kuslock drove in leadoff man Sadler with a sacrifice fly. They would get their last two runs in the second, albeit with some help.

First Jake Mele batting and Ryan Parise on second, an error by Riverside (9-10) shortstop Evan Burray brought Parise home to double the Bucs’ lead. Later, Mele came into score when Luke Camden’s grounder to first went through the legs of Mitchell Garvin – possibly helped by a bad hop – to push the lead to three.

“That’s huge,” Manion said. “When you’re dealing with a game like that, you don’t get too many opportunities in a playoff game that’s well played. So, when the other team makes mistakes, you have to capitalize. The name of the game is you limit your mistakes, and you take advantage of theirs. We did that today.”

“We’ve been in every game this year except for one game,” he said. “If we get that kind of effort from our pitchers, I like our chances.”