FAYETTEVILLE — The No. 5 University of Arkansas baseball team earned the No. 2 seed for the SEC Tournament with a strong finish against a difficult schedule.
The Razorbacks (43-12, 20-10 SEC) will not take the field again until Friday, the fourth day of the single-elimination SEC Tournament, at the Hoover Met in Hoover, Ala.
Arkansas hit the 20-win mark in SEC play for the third season in a row and the fifth time in the past six. The Hogs did it against what was arguably the toughest stretch run in the country. The Razorbacks’ final three league series were against No. 1 Texas, No. 2 LSU and No. 14 Tennessee, and they went 6-3 in that stretch with a sweep of the Longhorns and a series win over the Volunteers last weekend.
Arkansas Coach Dave Van Horn, asked about the 20-win standard, pointed out its significance.
“To win 20 in the toughest league in the country, it’s special to us,” Van Horn said.
He was also asked if he felt Arkansas had done enough to secure a home field role through the NCAA super regionals.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
The rationale behind that?
“Twenty wins in our league,” he said. “That’s probably the main thing. Yeah, that’s probably the main thing.”
The Hogs’ ending stretch featured a 5-1 mark at Baum-Walker Stadium, where the Razorbacks are 32-4 this season for the highest home win total in the country.
“We’ve played a lot of games at home, first, and then we’ve done really well here,” Van Horn said. “I think we lost one mid-week game. Give Missouri State credit.”
The other setbacks came in a series loss to Texas A&M on April 17-19, when the Razorbacks were going through their biggest stretch of adversity on the season, and in Thursday’s 10-7 defeat against Tennessee in the series opener.
“I just feel like home games, we played well here,” Van Horn said. “The crowds were good. The weather was not good at the beginning. It’s been great lately. Our guys are comfortable here and we field the ball. We don’t make a lot of errors.”
The Razorbacks flexed an area of strength in the closing series against Tennessee that they haven’t always been able to show this season: The depth of their pitching staff.
None of the Arkansas starters over the weekend — nominal staff ace Zach Root, regular closer Aiden Jimenez and junior Gage Wood — made it through the fourth inning. Nine relievers patched together 18 innings in the series and several of them stood out.
Most notably, senior Will McEntire and freshman Cole Gibler put together long scoreless stints of 3 2/3 innings and 3 1/3 innings, respectively, to spark wins in the final two games by the scores of 8-6 and 8-4. Junior Christian Foutch pitched in back-to-back games and provided three innings of scoreless relief with three strikeouts.
Sophomore Gabe Gaeckle and junior Landon Beidelschies, two staples in the rotation for most of the season, were the first relievers to enter in games 1 and 3, and the pair combined to record 15 outs but both allowed home runs.
The Razorbacks will enter the postseason in a much different position than they have in recent years, when the staff looked more settled and run scoring was at issue.
This time, the Hogs start the postseason with a .316 team batting average, tops in the SEC, a team record-tying 109 home runs, eight regulars hitting .300 or better, plus key reserve Carson Boles (.310) and seven players with double-digit home runs.
Van Horn and pitching coach Matt Hobbs have interesting decisions to make on the deployment of starting pitchers in Hoover and for an NCAA regional the following week, which will almost certainly take place at Baum-Walker Stadium. The Razorbacks have not been able to advance out of their home regional each of the past two seasons and the Hogs are hoping to put an end to that trend soon enough.
