Challengers go down quietly in season finale against Barracudas

After getting bashed 37-0 in Game 1 of Saturday's doubleheader, the Challengers' NLB-team also lost its season finale 16-1 to the crosstown rivals Zurich Barracudas in the Promotion Round.

	Adrian Kämpfer">Adrian Kämpfer was the only Challenger with at least two hits, finishing the season with a career-best .492 average.

The Challengers managed to score their only run of the day in the bottom of the first inning on an error by shortstop Ueli Von Burg.

The Barracudas sent 12 batters to the plate in an 8-run third inning to blow open a 2-1 ballgame.

After that, the Challengers conceded, and starter Oliver Marty lasted only 2 1-3 innings in his first outing of the season, giving up 10 runs - two of them unearned - on six hits and seven walks.

He was relieved by Oliver Labhart who was nursing a sore shoulder. But with no other options, the Challengers just hoped to survive the day and come out with a little less humiliating defeat than in Game 1.

The only Challenger getting two hits was Adrian Kämpfer, giving him a career-best .492 batting average, second only behind Chris Hardy's franchise-best .538 batting average.

On the positive note, the team set new records for a single season in several categories. The players collected 240 hits, 346 total bases, 61 doubles, two triples and a .549 slugging average.

Several players also set new individual single season records: Thomas Blank, who was all season in hunt for the batting title, ended up with a .484 batting average, the fourth-best mark in Challenger history, but he set season records with 33 RBI's and 53 total bases.

Besides the best single season batting average, Hardy now also holds the record for most doubles (13) and slugging average (.904).

And Kämpfer's .614 on-base percentage is also a new mark of excellence, beating Von Burg's nine-year old mark of .587.

And Claudio Deck, who was out of action for almost half the games due to a broken thumb, posted the second-best ERA ever at 5.12.