Dave Van Horn reveals where things got away from Arkansas in finale vs. Kentucky

No. 2 Arkansas couldn’t keep up with No. 8 Kentucky‘s bats after an early onslaught on Sunday, falling to the Wildcats 7-4 on the road and ultimately dropping the series 2-1.

Starting pitcher Mason Molina logged three innings of three-run baseball on the mound, leading to him being relieved by Will McEntire in the fourth. Six batters later, McEntire let up just as many runs on 14 pitches and was replaced by Christian Foutch before the end of the inning.

“Looking back on the game, it kind of got away from us there and in the fourth,” Arkansas head coach Dave Van Horn said postgame. “Molina — he just didn’t throw enough strikes. He had a really high pitch count for three innings and I don’t know, it just felt like we needed to go to [Will McEntire]. We were going to try to get an inning or two out of him and you know, it didn’t work out. He was fine — I think it was like 35 pitches on Friday, wasn’t on the board yesterday, and was getting ready for today.

“Our whole plan was to get him through a couple. We weren’t planning on being down by a few runs when we brought him in, but we were. Then we were going to probably go to just the way we did it –we’re gonna go to [Christian] Foutch and then maybe [Gabe] Gaeckle could throw the seventh, eighth and ninth, win the game. That’s the way we drew it up.”

Foutch would end up being the only Arkansas pitcher of the four that appeared on Sunday not to give up a Wildcat run. He finished the game pitching 1.1 innings allowing a hit and logging one strikeout.

“We just wanted Christian basically to come in, give us an inning, hold it and get it to Gaeckle and see if we could try to catch up,” he continued. “We came close, you know, it hurt us [with Kentucky] scoring that run into the seventh with the ball that kicked off [Peyton] Holt’s glove a little bit because there was no rush in the outfield there. It looked like he rushed to the runner on first and just a single up the middle and put us down.

“Instead of three, we’re down four with six outs to get, so that was a little bit disappointing. But really when you look at the series, we didn’t do we didn’t play great. We didn’t hit, we didn’t pitch very well after Friday. And you know, they just beat us.”

Gaeckle finished things up with a solid close over the final three innings, allowing one run on two hits, but the Razorbacks’ offense couldn’t come back from the fourth inning, which ended up being the difference in the final score. Gaeckle did not log a strikeout despite facing 11 Kentucky batters.

Arkansas will look to clean things up on the bump ahead of Friday’s home series against No. 14 Mississippi State.

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