The game started well for the Whitehall baseball team at Coca-Cola Park on Monday, but then it fizzled out, leaving them with a bad taste in their mouths.

After taking a 2-0 lead in the top of the first, they held Emmaus scoreless over the first three innings, but the Green Hornets exploded with four runs in the fourth, fifth and sixth innings. That barrage invoked the 10-run rule as the lead ballooned to 12-2, ending the game in the bottom of the sixth.

Coca-Cola Park hasn’t been kind to the Zephyrs. They haven’t won at the IronPigs domicile since 2013 when Elliot Mortimer pitched a gem, defeating Parkland 1-0.

Manager Shaun O’Boyle doesn’t put any stock into CCP having some mystical sway over his troops. It boils down to robust competition combined with some self-inflicted wounds.

“We’ve played some pretty good teams there,” said O’Boyle. “We just haven’t played well there.”

The Zephyrs are now 2-3 on the season after Monday’s loss. They’ll look to bounce back with a game against Freedom on Thursday.

The Zephs started out like gangbusters. The first three runners reached base with Paul Helman starting things off with an infield hit. An errant pick off attempt landed Helman at second, scoring on Robbie Lamm’s double. That was followed by Matt Dobeck’s double, scoring Lamm. But that was to be it as Emmaus starting pitcher Matt Lanzone retired the next two batters to get out of the jam.

O’Boyle said that Lanzone wasn’t overpowering, but he managed to settle down after that rocky first inning and put up goose eggs the rest of the way. The Zephs were able to get runners on in a number of innings, banging out seven hits, but they never got that crucial hit that would have drew them closer to their eastern Pennsylvania Conference foe.

Perhaps a bigger impediment was their play in the field. The Zephs committed five errors that helped Emmaus build that lead.

“We didn’t play well on the other side [of the ball],” said O’Boyle.

They also had some lapses on the base paths, as a pickoff play in the fourth also helped douse a potential rally. O’Boyle said that they got their lead-off man aboard in the fifth, but ran into some tough outs with some hard hit balls that found Hornets webbing.

“We had opportunities, but when you don’t take advantage of that, that’s a tough spot to be in,” said O’Boyle.

O’Boyle believes that his team still needs to find its footing.

“We have a lot of work to do,” O’Boyle said. “We’re just too inconsistent right now.”

Some of their fielding woes in the loss against Emmaus can be attributed to preparation, said O’Boyle. He said that they needed to be ready when a scorching ground ball is hit to them. He can live with physical errors, but believes that mental preparation which involves being focused on the batter when the ball is hit, no matter how hard, is something he needs to address.

He also said he needs to have them prepared better for certain situations. That will be their focus this week.