Cologne, Minn. – The pitching of the Martin Luther College Knights stifled Crown's bats on Tuesday as the visitors swept a baseball doubleheader from the Storm.  The Knight's Jonathon Kock and Matthew Olson threw back to back complete games, striking out a combined 20 batters in 18 innings of work as MLC won 9-4 and 5-0.

Game one saw Martin Luther score in each of the first four innings to build a 5-0 lead.  Crown got on the board in the bottom of the fourth as Joel Silva homered off the scoreboard in left to score Berend Schnabel and pull Crown back to within three runs.  It was the freshman's third homerun of the year.

Martin Luther would blow the game open in the sixth, scoring four times to take a commanding 9-2 lead.

Harry Ballantyne would score a run in the seventh and again in the ninth, the latter on an RBI single from Dalton Wintersole, but that would be it for Crown as the final score would read 9-4.

Game two was a pitcher's duel at the start as Trent Krekelberg threw six fantastic innings, allowing just one run through the first six frames.

Krekelberg had a bit of bad luck in the sixth, as the freshman right hander struck out Martin Luther's cleanup hitter to end the inning, but the ball in the dirt was not immediately recovered and the throw down to first struck the runner in the back, giving the Knights the chance to continue the inning.
 
The Knights surged ahead in the seventh when a one out single chased Krekelberg after 6.1 very solid innings.  After a fly ball out, the Knights strung together three singles and a walk to score four times in the inning and build a comfortable 5-0 lead.

As it turned out, the Knights wouldn't need any more than one run on the evening as Crown could only manage five hits in game two.

After a promising 3-1 start to conference play, the Storm have now lost seven straight to fall to 3-8 in the UMAC with a pivotal three game series against North Central this coming weekend.