Challengers come back to salvage split against Flyers

Bryan Shemley collected a season-high three hits, and both Harry Bregy and Tobias Siegrist slugged their first homers of the season in a 9-4 win over the Therwil Flyers.

It was Bregy's first home run since July 3, 2004 against the Zurich Barracudas, and Siegrist ended a drought of 19 games since his last homer.

Although the Flyers took a 2-0 lead off starter Bregy, the Challengers remained focused and came back run after run.

In the third inning, Bregy hit his homer, a solo shot off Neslon Vilomar, and in the fourth, a balk by Vilomar and Shemley's RBI-single gave the Challengers their first lead.

They extended that lead to 5-1 in the fifth inning on Siegrist's two-run homer with two outs.

In the sixth, the Flyers added one more run to their total on Mario Cuevas' RBI-single.

But the Challengers responded with two runs of their own. Patrick Zöllig hit a sac fly to center that scored Shemley, and Bregy drove in another run with an RBI-single up the middle.

The Flyers took one more unearned run off Bregy, as Adrian Kaufmann stole home.

After allowing a leadoff walk to start the eighth inning, Bregy's day on the mound was over. He wound up with the win, going seven innings in which he allowed four runs - three of them unearned - on six hits and two walks while also striking out four.

Geovanni Ureña relieved and pitched two perfect innings to close the game.

The Challengers added two more runs in the eighth inning on a perfectly executed squeeze play, and yet another balk, the third of the game by a Flyers pitcher.

Game notes
Bregy is 3-0 on the season, his best start into a season since 2001 when he won his first five decisions, and was 5-1 at the end of the campaign. ...Siegrist's two-run blast completed his 200th RBI in the NLA, sixth alltime and one behind Manny Marchant. ...Chris Palatinus extended his team-leading hitting streak to nine games by going 3-for-8 in the doubleheader.