Hogs down three SEC series in row

FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas has now lost three SEC series in a row and have nine games in the conference remaining.
Arkansas (14-7) is tied with LSU for second place in the SEC behind Texas (19-2) who is running away with the race for top seed. Tennessee (13-8) is hanging right by the Hogs and LSU.
As fate, or in this case schedule makers, would have it Arkansas faces Texas, LSU and Tennessee the next three weekends. The good news is Texas and Tennessee come to Baum-Walker Stadium while the Hogs will also go to Baton Rouge. The Razorbacks will go to Missouri State Tuesday night for a 6 p.m. non-conference game which marks the last one of the season.
Missouri State beat Arkansas 14-13 in 10 innings on March 25 at Baum-Walker Stadium. Arkansas (37-9) has bigger worries though then a midweek game against Missouri State. A few week's ago the Hogs were ranked No. 1 in the nation and now having lost three SEC series in a row and at least on paper the best teams in the league remaining hosting a regional could even be in jeopardy. Dave Van Horn relayed what he told his team after Sunday's disappointing 9-5 loss to Florida, a game they once led 5-1.
"We just got to get better at a few things," Van Horn said. "No. 1, we have to have a little better clutch hitting, left too many runners out there. Kind of the same thing happened on Friday. Friday, we struck out too many times. Kind of corrected that last couple of days, but couldn’t really get the big hit. So that happened. It kind of runs in streaks a little bit. Starting pitching got to get better, has to show us a little more. That’d be the two things that jump out at me right away."
Starting pitching that looked so promising to start the season hasn't been good in several weeks. Getting Gage Wood back from injury may help as he looked almost unhittable on Saturday in the lone game Arkansas won in Gainesville. He is under a strict pitch count now, but that will be long gone by time postseason rolls around. However, Arkansas may have suffered another pitching blow on Sunday when ace reliever Carson Wiggins left injured.
"Oh, yeah, it's the bad part," Van Horn said. "It's the elbow. He felt it when he picked it first. Who knows when it happened? He threw the ball… I think the couple of pitches he threw were 99, 100 miles an hour. It just didn't feel right when he picked. So he's smart enough to say something and get out of there and we'll get it looked at tomorrow."

That isn't good news for the team since the bullpen has actually been pretty good. They have had to pitch a lot of innings since starters aren't going deep into games.
"Oh, yeah. It's been a lot of short starts all season long it seems like," Van Horn said. "We had a couple of good ones there in the middle, but if we could put together back-to-back good starts, like six, seven innings that would be awesome. We haven't done it in a while. We've got some guys, we can bring them in. The first time they seem to do pretty good. It's tough doubling up and I didn't want (Aiden) Jimenez to go again today. He probably could have gone a little bit, but he threw up and down a few times yesterday and we finally bring him in. It's just too much. Trying to make sure he's healthy at the end of the year."
Even the hitting that was dominating until recently has started to dry up some it seems.
"I think we just didn’t take advantage of some pitches that we fouled straight back," Van Horn said. "The approach was pretty good, you’re not going to get hits every time at the plate, but you got to make adjustments. I thought that, I think his name was Pinnop (he means Alex Philpott), whatever his name was, second pitcher did a pretty good job of slowing us down. (Christian) Rodriguez came in and they realized that we were going to get on him pretty quick and they went with (Luke) McNeillie, who has been one of their conference starters and he held us down for awhile.
"Then we hit a ball to the fence with two on and two out, down three. Another ball to the fence the inning before. We just didn’t have a lot go our way, but we need to setup those innings a little bit earlier. Not wait until the eighth and ninth innings to really rally a little bit. That’s what was disappointing."
The Hogs lost 6-4 on Friday and then won 7-0 on Saturday. The other series Arkansas has lost were to Georgia (12-9) and Texas A&M (8-13). The A&M series was at Baum-Walker which stings a little more.
The bottom line is the Hogs have a difficult schedule remaining and how those series play out will determine if the team is home or traveling in the postseason.