FAYETTEVILLE -- No. 5 Arkansas jumped on Little Rock early on Tuesday night and used a strong pitching performance by Tate McGuire and two relievers to take a 10-0 run-rule, 7-inning win at Baum-Walker Stadium.
Arkansas (35-7) took a 5-0 lead in the bottom of the second then added four more in the third and one in the fourth. Brent Iredale hit a solo home run to get it started in the second inning. Dave Van Horn praised his team and McGuire.
"Yeah, I just thought we played solid baseball," Van Horn said. "You know we walked the first two hitters of the game and you’re thinking, ‘Wow, here we go. We’re going to get into some pitching tonight.’ And then we got kind of lucky, line-drive double play. (Wehiwa) Aloy did a tremendous job of catching it and getting it out of his glove like that and threw a perfect ball to (Gabe) Fraser for a bang-bang double play. We got out of the inning and obviously didn’t score. But then we punched in five. They made a couple of mistakes. Threw away a pickoff. I think they were slowing down a little bit to get the pitcher in the bullpen ready and picked a couple of times. Ended up throwing it by the runner and we got our fifth run. Pretty solid up and down the lineup offensively. We did hit some balls right at them.
"But I think McGuire settled in. He threw a lot of off-speed pitches tonight. Didn’t command his fastball real well. But pitched just good enough. Then obviously when you get a nine-run lead a team is going to start pressing a little bit and yeah, just nice job by our team. They needed a little rest and I felt like they were a little sharper today."
McGuire did walk the first two hitters in the game. Then, as Van Horn noted, Aloy made the catch of a Ryan Geck line drive and flipped the ball to Fraser at second to retire Alex Seguine. McGuire (3-2) pitched 5.0 innings allowing just three hits, walking two and fanning a trio. Dylan Carter and Carson Wiggins each worked a perfect inning in relief. Wiggins struck out all three hitters he faced. Van Horn talked about the adjustments McGuire made to settle in.
"The first inning, he was just wild," Van Horn said. "Like I said a minute ago, I felt like he didn’t locate his fastball for pretty much for five innings but he was able to throw his offspeed pitches for strikes, ahead in the count, behind in the count and mix in a fastball just enough. I just think the adjustment he made was Ryder Helfrick and McGuire just decided tonight is the night you’re going to throw a lot of offspeed pitches because that’s what you have really good command of. That’s what it looked like from the side because it was 65%, 70% offspeed tonight, maybe more, maybe 75%. Did a good job. Got us through five innings on a midweek game when you got another one the next day. Saved some guys for tomorrow."
Iredale got hit by a pitch in addition to hitting his home run. Van Horn put hot hitting Reese Robinett in for him in the fourth inning.
"Yeah it was really good to see him drive that ball," Van Horn said of Iredale. "That was into the wind and he smoked it. Right off the bat we said, ‘That’s gone.’
"Yeah, it’s hard to hit a ball the other way that hard. His next at-bat he walked, no he got hit in the hand. Took him out of the game. It cut his hand. It was just above the hand, probably about where you wear your watch. We had a good lead, I just felt it would be a good time to get Reese in there at third and get Brent out of there and let him get a little ice on there. If he’s good to go tomorrow, he’ll play."
Cam Kozeal had three hits in four at bats. Fraser added a pair of hits and plated a pair of runs as well. Fraser has done a good job filling in for the injured Nolan Souza. Logan Maxwell had one hit and also knocked in a pair of runs.
The Arkansas trio on the mound limited Little Rock (18-21) to just three hits. The Trojans committed five errors. Starter Zach Busick (1-1) took the loss. He lasted just 1.2 innings allowing four hits, five runs, walked three and only struck out one Razorback. The Trojans also used three pitchers and they only struck out three Hogs. Gage Haley and Brenden Katz were the other pitchers.
Van Horn said Wiggins in the seventh treated it like a save situation and looked extremely sharp. He struck out three only throwing 13 pitches.
"We were treating it like we needed to get him an inning to pitch and if it was 2-1 or 22-1, he was going to pitch tonight, whether we were winning or losing, because he’s not pitching tomorrow because we’d like to have him available for Friday," Van Horn said. "Same with Carter. Kind of like get them a bullpen and it leaves us approximately eight guys for tomorrow if we need to throw them. But yeah, you have to be… These Tuesday-Wednesday games between conference… The crazy thing about this, the way we travel and different things, we’re telling guys to pack their bags, bring their bags today, so they can get on a bus that’s dead headed to Florida when we’re supposed to concentrate on playing today and tomorrow. But we’re packing our bag to go to Florida. So I give our team a lot of credit for what they did tonight, because they stayed focused, they took care of business and all their bags for Florida are piled outside our locker room and the bus has probably already picked them up and are on their way now. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes that people don’t know. But I appreciate that we get to fly to Florida."
The two teams will play again Wednesday at 5 p.m. and televised on the SEC Network. Van Horn was asked the value of playing two mid-week games?
"Maybe none," Van Horn said. "Maybe getting some guys some work. Maybe wearing your team out. The problem is, you’re supposed to schedule 56 games. It’s hard to get 56 games. Fayetteville is not easy to get to. It’s not like you can run down the highway and go play all these schools. When you’re at some of the schools in our league, you can run down the road 20 minutes, 15 minutes and play some Division 1 schools all around town. Can’t do that here. When you get a team that’ll say, ‘yeah, I’ll play you two’ That’s two off of 56.
"We got 30 conference, so we got to schedule 26 non-conference games. At least that’s the way I figure it. We try to do it. I’d rather not play two at this time of year, but if we do play two, it’s nice when you can play seven innings and only use three pitchers. The two that threw there were not going to throw tomorrow if they didn’t throw tonight. The other schools play two, but a lot of them play early. We have trouble getting teams to play us two early. The other issue is our weather, it’s not like we know it’s going to be 70 and sunny like in San Diego. You just get em when you can. Some years it’s a good thing, some years it’s not."
