Dave Van Horn evaluates Hunter Hollan’s start in regular season finale

The Arkansas Razorbacks men’s baseball team wrapped up their season Saturday against Vanderbilt. The game didn’t go the way the Razorbacks would like as they fell on the road to the Commodores 6-7. Starting pitcher Hunter Hollan had a rough outing, and skipper Dave Van Horn did his best to make sense of his pitchers’ performance.

“His stuff wasn’t bad. We weren’t planning on pitching him very long today, if possible,” said Van Horn. “(It) would have been a lot easier; we might not even have pitched him today if we’d have won yesterday. So I would have played a lot of different players today if we had won yesterday. But (he was) throwing the ball around the plate. (He) wasn’t really putting it on. They did a nice job. They nickeled and dimed him pretty good. You talk about bloopers and cap balls, and he made good pitches, and they just found holes. You’re kind of going, wow. He was a little frustrated with it. And he pitched out of a jam or two. So this would give him an opportunity to rest a little bit.

Hollan was only out there for 2.2 innings, but the Commodores’ batters were able to make the most of his time on the mound. Hollan allowed eight hits, and four runs, with four earned runs. But the Razorbacks ace was able to pick up three strikes in Arkansas’ season finale.

While it would’ve been easy for Van Horn to rest the blame solely on the Razorbacks’ pitching struggles, the Arkansas skipper was also critical of his team’s batting. Arkansas has had its fair-share of good times at the plate, they’ve been inconsistent recently. Van Horn believes there’s much to be desired at the moment, but he believes it’ll all work out for the Razorbacks right now.

“You know, I’d say middle of the road right now,” Van Horn answered, asked to give an evaluation on where his team is offensively at the moment. “It’s been better. We’ve put together some good innings, but we’ve got to get some guys going. You know, guys that have been around. They’ve had — when you think about a couple weeks back, Mississippi State, the weekend that [Parker] Rowland had. Kendall Diggs and those guys. Then they kind of tapered off last weekend. We’ve got to get them all going.

“I mean, Peyton Holt was huge for our offense this weekend. He looked more like a guy that should be in the three hole, and that might happen.”

Perhaps Dave Van Horn and the Razorbacks will have to rely on the aforementioned Rowland, Diggs and Holt moving forward, but it’ll be tough to achieve their ultimate goal of winning the College World Series that way. Arkansas needs contributors throughout their order, but it remains to be seen if they’ll get them in the next couple of weeks.

On3’s Steve Samra contributed to this story

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