By Otis Kirk
FAYETTEVILLE -- While Dave Van Horn has been quiet on his pitching rotation for the Stillwater Regional he's also unsure of his batting order.
Van Horn has tried various players leading off. Cayden Wallace and Braydon Webb have batted there in recent games. Webb was moved to leadoff against Florida with Wallace handling it in the games leading up to that. Van Horn talked about the batting order earlier this week.
"I can go look at on-base percentage and batting average and runs scored, and it’ll drive you crazy," Van Horn said. "(Zack) Gregory's got the best on-base percentage, but he's not hitting real well right now. But he's still getting on. It's hard to put him at the top or in the two hole. Webb's dangerous. He actually will take a walk, but he can hit a home run. Wallace has done a pretty good job there, but I don't know if he loves it there. So what I'm going to do is try to put together a lineup that maybe can get us on a run. Maybe one that can work for a while. So still tinkering, and hopefully something will work out."
Against Florida while leading off Webb got one hit, a two-run home run, in four tries. He also walked once, but struck out twice.
In the middle of winning two games in eight tries to end the regular season and SEC Tournament much chatter has been about the apparent lack of leaders on this team. Van Horn addressed that issue as well.
"The team is not real vocal," Van Horn said. "It’s something we’ve talked about a lot. But we have a lot of really good people on this team, so to speak. They’ll lead, but they really want to lead by example. We don’t have a lot of ‘rah rah’ guys. It’s kind of nice to have a guy who will get with you every now and then and gets upset and can command that locker room a little bit. We have a lot of leaders. But as far as the vocal one, honestly I don’t know if we really have one."
While some fans are writing this team off having gone into a tailspin at the end of the season one only has to look to Arkansas' past to know that may be a little premature. For instance the last time the Razorbacks played a regional on the road was 2015 at Stillwater. Arkansas won it and then defeated Missouri State to advance to the College World Series. There's other instances.
"Well, basically I think, like I mentioned earlier as well, when you get to this part of the season, if you haven’t finished well and you get in, you’re just kind of glad that the regular season’s behind you, you did enough work to get an opportunity to go to a regional and hope you can get back a little bit of that confidence and get back to where you were playing better," Van Horn said. "That’s what definitely happened in 2012. 2015 was a really, really rough start. I think we were 15-15 at one point. I think we won a game at Memphis, went on down to Ole Miss, played okay and we just got better. It wasn’t an overly talented team as far as pro players, except for (Andrew) Benintendi, who was the best player in college baseball that year. But we had just enough and we won. We had some things go our way.
"We did win the regional at Stillwater and then we got to play at home because of the stadium issue with Missouri State and we did just enough to win that game 3-2 in Game 3. It was tough. You never know how it’s going to go. You never know exactly what’s going through some of your guys’ heads as far as confidence or super excited to be here or looking forward to the next chapter in their life. Just try to round them up and get them to come together for a weekend and see if you can move on."
Oklahoma State has a new stadium since Arkansas was there in 2015. Van Horn is looking forward to his team playing in it and feels his hitters may like it as well.
"I would say it sits the same direction that the old ballpark did. It was definitely a hitter’s park," Van Horn said. "It all has to do with the wind, so when the wind’s out of the south/SE/SW it’s going to be blowing out somewhere, maybe even out of the West.
"I would say on those days, it’s a hitter’s park. On the other days, it plays pretty normal or maybe more toward a pitcher’s park. That’s the way it works usually in this reason, this area, with the way the wind blows."
Arkansas and Grand Canyon will meet at noon on Friday and televised on the SEC Network.