After rattling off seven straight victories, the Pleasant Valley baseball team has found itself in a bit of a rut of late.

Monday, the Bears began a stretch of five Eastern Pennsylvania Conference games in a six days.Pleasant Valley opened the week with a loss to East Stroudsburg North. It didn't get any better Wednesday as Pleasant Valley suffered an 8-1 setback to Emmaus."The beautiful thing about baseball is we have a game tomorrow," Lazowski said. "There's no real time to think about it. No real time to rest on our laurels. We had some success early on where we had a lot of wins, but now it's time for us to face adversity."We got to open the eyes a little bit more and we will see what kind of team we are here."The Bears found the kind of team they don't want to be down the stretch against Emmaus.While the Green Hornets had no problem picking up timely hits, the Bears struggled to deliver when they had scoring opportunities.Three times during the game, the Bears couldn't push a run across home plate with the bases loaded."We can talk about that until we are blue in the face, but that's baseball," said Lazowski, who saw his Bears strand a total of 12 baserunners in the game. "Sometimes you get the fortunate hit. Sometimes you don't."Timely hitting wins a lot of ball games and loses a lot of ball games."The only time that the Bears could buy a run was in the third inning.With two outs, Brett Hardy sliced a liner down the left-field line for a single. Justin Stasiak moved Hardy to third with a hit and Connor Pandolfo followed with an RBI single to right field to score Hardy with the Bears' lone run.In the fourth and fifth innings, the Bears had opportunities with runners in scoring position, but couldn't find a way to capitalize.In the fourth, Nick Gauttuso was left stranded at third with no outs. In the fifth, Pandolfo's courtesy runner, Jacob Adamski, was standing at third and Matt Burnett was left at second base.While the Bears were able to record nine hits in the game, they couldn't utilize them to their advantage in scoring runs."We can only say so much to them," Lazowski said. "It's up to the guys that are out there playing to go ahead and get it done. We have some good leadership on the team."You can let it get you down. You got to believe in one another and we have been preaching that for a long time. Now, it's time to have a little gut check and see what we're all about."BAT ON THE BALL… While timely hits were non-existent for PV yesterday, Bears' shortstop Brett Hardy found success against Emmaus pitching. After striking out in his first at-bat, Hardy collected singles in his next three appearances.STUNG MULTIPLE TIMES… Eric Cichocki showed why he is the Green Hornets' leadoff hitter. Cichocki reached base in all five plate appearances. He recorded two singles, three walks, two runs scored and three stolen bases.BUSY WEEK… Two down, three to go. The Bears (8-4 overall; 5-4 EPC) will host Stroudsburg today. PV will travel to East Stroudsburg South Friday afternoon and Northampton on Saturday.Emmaus 202 030 1 - 8 10 0Pleasant Vy. 001 000 0 - 1 9 0Moxey, Henseler (5) and Hahn; Coursey, George (4), Jo. Adamski (6) and Pandolfo. W - Moxey. L - Coursey.