Challengers outslugged and buried, ready to face playouts

Game 2 began as a face-off of two young starters, Thomas Burger vs. Yannick Dudli.

	Thomas Burger remains winless in his rookie season, allowing eight runs in 1 2-3 innings on Saturday.

Both performed a good first inning, Burger with the stain of a leadoff walk without consequences, and both got into trouble already in the second inning.

Dudli loaded the bases by walking the first three batters.

But Burger's follow-up grounder wasn't strong enough to score Orlando Balbuena from third.

Willy Schaub then plated Adrian Kämpfer">Adrian Kämpfer with his fielder's choice grounder to third, and Dudli loaded the bases again by hitting rookie Corsin Jost with a pitch.

Roger Burger drove in two with a great double and Gerry Obeng's walk loaded the bases again.

But slugger Thomas Blank, who wasn't able to produce all game long, missed the chance and popped out to first.

Burger started off better in his half of the inning.

He quickly got two outs with a runner on third and one run scored.

But then he followed with a hit-by-pitch, gave up three subsequent hits and three subsequent walks.

The score was 6-3 and after hitting the 12th batter he faced in that inning, the day was done for Burger and Balbuena stepped to the plate to walk one more run in and finish the inning.

In the third inning, Balbuena got on by an error and scored after another walk to Kämpfer and some smart base-running action between the two.

After this, hitting his second batter was it also for Dudli, and Wicki returned to the rubber.

Another error loaded the bases for Schaub, but his bunt was not good enough to plate Kämpfer.

In a classic sac-fly situation, Jost hit the ball perfectly to right field, but baserunner Rodolfo Batista erred on the out-count and had to return to third for the tag-up, while Schaub got doubled off at first to end the inning.

After his team scored three runs off Balbuena, Wicki held the Challengers short in the next inning.

All of a sudden, the Challengers' defense now started to crack, allowing the Helvetics to score three unearned runs off Balbuena on two errors.

At the score of 14-4, Kämpfer, Batista, Thomas Burger and Schaub had back-to-back hits in the fifth inning to relight the fire.

But again with bases loaded and no outs, the Challengers weren't able to score, as Richi Ammann, Roger Burger with K's and Obeng with a poor grounder to the pitcher put a quick end to all hopes.

Thus Kämpfer's run on Batistas double was the only Challengers benefit, and also turned out to be the last one.

Kämpfer, as the teams' coach, decided to not give Balbuena as a foreign pitcher too many innings, and brought up Schaub again.

The decision turned out to be a bad one.

After the first batter got on on an error, Schaub gave up a total of four hits and four walks, only interrupted by one pop-out to extend the score to 20-5.

For the first time since last years' 37-0 loss to the Zürich Barracudas, Blank went on the mound.

And for the first time in his career he succeeded.

In the last two innings he struck out four and gave up three hits and one base-on-balls.

And because Helvetic slugger Sopa would not hit his two-run homer before Blank let a foul pop-up drop out of his glove, the game-finishing five runs in the sixth inning weren't even earned.

After the withdrawal of the Romanshorn Submarines from this years' competition, the Challengers will now face only the Hünenberg Unicorns in the Relegation Round.

And they probably will have to win it big time if they don't want to be in the Playouts against the second-best team of the 1.Liga.