C's survive bottom of seventh as Kovac and son no-hit Devils

Saturday's second game became a tight affair, in the end, but the Challengers held on to the lead in the final inning as starter Korey Kovac and his father combined for a no-hitter against the Wil Devils.

The Kovac's combined linescore looks impressive: 0 hits, 2 unearned runs, 1 walk, 10 strikeouts. They only allowed five baserunners: one free pass to the first Devils batter of the game, 2 hit batters while 2 reached on errors.

Nonetheless, the Devils brought the winning run to the plate in the final inning.

With Challengers third baseman Dean Scherbaum playing deep, Devils' Sandro Nussberger led the inning off with a bunt along the baseline, Kurt hustled to the ball but let the throw sail far over first base towards the batting cage.

Nussberger ended up on third on the play and scored on Trüb's grounder to third as catcher Adrian Kämpfer">Adrian Kämpfer could not hold on to the ball.

Moments later, with runners on first and second and one out, Florian Entner flied out weakly to second baseman Daiki Sato who tried to double up the runner at first. The runner beat the throw, but overran the base and was tagged for the third out. The umpires ruled that a new play and counted Trüeb who had crossed the plate in the meantime as the second Devils run for the final score of 3-2.

Despite collecting more hits (7, 4 of them for extra-bases) than in the first game of the day the Challengers had to scrap their runs together.

The team left runners in scoring position in every but the first and fourth inning, with the Challengers hitters' LOB number adding up to 21.

Korey scored the first Challengers run on a passed ball, while Kämpfer plated two runners with his first of two doubles.

Game notes:
With his 2 RBI's Kämpfer passed Nick Lehmann for the Challengers' all-time NLB-record for RBI's with 103.