Arkansas Pitching Staff Stands Out Not Just For Quality, But Also Depth

Image credit: Will McEntire (Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images)

Arkansas was locked in a pitchers’ duel at Auburn on March 21. The Razorbacks scored a run in the top of the first inning but hadn’t been able to scratch out anything more. Meanwhile, All-American lefthander Hagen Smith had stymied the Tigers for six innings, striking out 12 and working around three hits and two walks.

Things got a little messy in the sixth, however. A hit batter, an error and a four-pitch walk had loaded the bases for Auburn with two outs before Smith rolled a ground ball to end the inning on his 87th pitch of the night.

Arkansas could have sent Smith back out to start the seventh inning. It was a tight ballgame; its ace was on the mound and his pitch count was manageable. Instead, coach Dave Van Horn and pitching coach Matt Hobbs made the call to the bullpen for senior righthander Will McEntire. He threw two perfect innings before turning the game over to freshman righthander Gabe Gaeckle, who got the final three outs of Arkansas’ 1-0 victory in the series opener.

Two days later, Arkansas faced a different—but similar—decision. The Razorbacks led, 5-1, in the sixth inning. Starting pitcher Mason Molina had thrown five solid innings on 74 pitches. But he had started the third time through the order in the fifth inning, his stuff had taken a bit of a dip and the Tigers had scored a run on a walk and two hits.

The Razorbacks again made the move to the bullpen. This time, it didn’t work quite as planned. They needed three pitchers to get out of the sixth, and by the time the inning was over, the 5-1 lead had turned into a 7-6 deficit. Auburn went on to win the game, 8-6, avoiding the sweep.

“The tactic was we have a lead, he’s gotten us this far, it was starting to falter a little, so let’s go fresh arm because we have fresh arms,” Hobbs said. “I feel like that’s going to work out more times than it isn’t.”

Arkansas has consistently stuck to that process this season and, far more often than not, it’s worked. The Razorbacks are 29-3, ranked No. 1 in the Top 25 and are riding a 10-game winning streak going into this weekend’s series at Alabama.

The pitching staff—both its depth and quality—has been a big reason for the Razorbacks’ outstanding start to the season. They lead the nation in ERA at 2.56, well ahead of No. 2 Texas A&M’s mark of 3.23. It’s not just earned runs, either. Arkansas has allowed just 85 total runs, an average of 2.66 per game. Every other team in the country has allowed more than 120 runs. The Arkansas defense also deserves some of the credit, as it is fielding .981 (11th nationally).

Smith has arguably been the best pitcher in the country this season. He’s 6-0, 1.76 with 83 strikeouts and 14 walks in 41 innings.

“I think maybe people don’t realize what they’re watching,” Van Horn said. “I’ve watched a lot of baseball games, watched a lot of pitchers, had a lot of pitchers, but Hagen is really good. And you know it’s just hard to come out and be good every outing. He’s become such a pitcher now.”

Molina (3-0, 3.38) and righthander Brady Tygart (3-0, 2.70) join him in the nation’s best rotation. McEntire (2-0, 1.75, 4 SV) has emerged as one of the nation’s elite relievers. The bullpen overall has a 2.80 ERA, which leads the nation according to data compiled by FridayStarters.com.

“It seems like when guys are getting an opportunity they’re going in there and taking advantage of their time on the mound and pitching extremely well,” Van Horn said.

Arkansas has top-end talent. What really sets it apart from other national championship contenders is the number of quality pitchers it can turn to in any game. It’s not an accident that the Razorbacks have built that kind of pitching staff in 2024. Its depth requires intention in roster building and in the day-to-day management of the staff.

All that work has been successful so far, but the ultimate payoff is still a couple months away in the postseason. That’s what all the effort is building toward.

“We need a bunch of guys,” Hobbs said. “We need to find seven, eight guys you trust in a pen, three starters, a couple guys that if you get to game four of a regional that can go out and start.

“If we do that, we’ll have as good a chance as anybody else.”

The massive Hunt Family Baseball Development Center looms beyond the right field wall at Arkansas’ Bam-Walker Stadium. The building, which opened in 2022, houses the program’s offices, locker room, weight room and pitching center. The Arkansas website calls it the pitching lab, but Hobbs doesn’t like that classification. Whatever you call it, this is where the Razorbacks’ pitching staff was built.

The pitching area is big and fully tricked out. There’s a force plate mound, edgertronic cameras, KinaTrax motion-capture system and TrackMan. The technology, along with Hobbs and director of analytics DJ Baxendale, help the players get immediate feedback. Two garage doors open into the Arkansas bullpen, giving the pitchers even more room to work.

And the Razorbacks put a lot of work in at the pitching center. Getting a lot of pitchers game experience has been critical to the staff’s success this season, but development in practice settings remains vital.

“When you look back and look at why has this program been good for 22 years under coach Van Horn, it’s because players get better here,” Hobbs said. “For them to do that, they have to be able to throw their bullpen. They’ve got to be able to work in between their starts. If you’re pushing a guy to 120 pitches every week, what work is he getting done on Tuesdays? They still have to get better.”

To that end, an Arkansas pitcher has thrown more than 100 pitches in a game just once this season (Smith threw 105 last week in six innings against Mississippi). Hobbs said he doesn’t see any magic in that number; he is just looking to save an inning here or there early in the season so that the starters are fresh down the stretch and into June.

With its relievers, Arkansas has worked to expand—not contract—its circle of trust. McEntire (15 appearances), righthander Koty Frank (13 appearances), lefthanded specialist Stone Hewlett (13 appearances), Gaeckle (11 appearances) and righthander Gage Wood (11 appearances) have been called upon most often, but Arkansas has shown a willingness to use nearly anyone on its staff in leverage situations.

It has 11 pitchers who have made more than two relief appearances this season and they all have had an opportunity to pitch in a big spot.

“The only way to expose enough of these guys to leverage is to just jump into the cold pool,” Hobbs said. “Just do it. Sometimes it’s going to work and sometimes it isn’t. But if we can have enough guys that are experienced as we get towards the middle and end of the season, it’s just going to benefit our pitching staff because you’re not going to run guys into the ground.”

Building a staff of this depth took time. Smith and Tygart have been crucial pieces to the Arkansas pitching staff since arriving in Fayetteville in the fall of 2021. At the end of last season, with Smith and Tygart set to return to the rotation in 2024, Arkansas went looking for another starter in the transfer portal and landed Molina, who earned all-Big 12 honors in 2023 at Texas Tech.

McEntire pitched sparingly in his first two years at Arkansas before emerging as a bigger part of the staff in 2022. He threw a team-high 87 innings in 2023 and was set for a bullpen role in 2024, though no one could have expected he would become one of the best relievers in the country.

“It’s like he’s insurance,” Van Horn said. “You just know you can go to that guy. He’s always ready to pitch, he wants to pitch. It’s like having a security blanket that way.”

Wood last year took over as closer as a true freshman, and his return gave Arkansas another big piece of the puzzle in the bullpen. Hewlett was added through the transfer portal from Kansas. Frank arrived a year ago from Nebraska but missed much of 2023 due to injury. Gaeckle and lefthander Collin Fisher (6-1, 1.96) are two of Arkansas’ star freshmen from their second-ranked 2023 recruiting class.

That’s years of recruitment and development to create an elite pitching staff. It hasn’t been easy, and it’s required a lot of work and planning—and a bit of luck. Hobbs felt like they were on the way to building a deep staff last year before injuries took out some of the more experienced pitchers.

But now Arkansas has that depth, even to the point of having a lefthanded specialist, a true rarity in the college game. Hewelett has added another weapon to the bullpen. Seventeen of the 29 batters he’s faced this season have been lefthanded. They are 2-for-16 with a walk and 13 strikeouts.

“That’s his job: come in and get a lefty,” Van Horn said. “He could do it three times on a weekend. Doesn’t bother him a bit. He’s known it since we recruited him that you come here and this is what we’re going to use you as, and he was all in.”

To successfully build this kind of pitching staff, the pitchers themselves also need to buy in. Players want the ball as often and as much as they can get it. Everyone wants to pitch in conference series, but there are only 27 innings to go around.

The Razorbacks have bought into the approach, knowing that their chances will come.

“I know they all want to pitch more than they pitch,” Hobbs said. “But I think they also understand those thoughts make it about you and it’s not about you, it’s about our team.

“It’s about you in the fall. That’s when it’s about your breaking ball, it’s about how you’re going to get better, it’s about this, this and this. As soon as the season starts, you have to suspend a lot of that. You still need to get better, you still need to work, you still need to develop, but whether you throw to a hitter or you throw three innings or you throw seven, it’s about our team trying to figure out how to beat whoever’s on the other side, it’s not about what you individually are doing.

“I do feel like these guys have really grabbed on to that. I hope they have. I feel like they have, I hope they have. They sure pitch like they have and if they can do it for a season, who knows where they can take it.”

Arkansas tops the national leaderboard in just about every pitching statistic the NCAA tracks: ERA (2.56), hits allowed per nine innings (5.98), shutouts (6), strikeout-to-walk ratio (4.16), strikeouts per nine innings (13.1) and WHIP (1.01).

They’re all impressive raw numbers. But no one in the Hunt Center is tracking them in any serious way. The pitchers are competitive among each other about their strikeout totals on a game-by-game basis, but it doesn’t go beyond that.

And Hobbs wants it to stay that way.

“You can let this thing go sideways on you if you start thinking you’re the best in the country at something,” Hobbs said. “You forget why you’re good at it. They’re good because they throw it over the plate. Ultimately, if you look at the difference between great and good and average pitching staffs, it’s how often do you get your good stuff in the zone. You have to have good stuff, but how often do you get it in the zone?

“That’s why Hagen has been good this year, he’s throwing more strikes. Will McEntire throws a lot of strikes. Gabe Gaeckle, when he’s been good, has been throwing a lot of strikes. You take your really good stuff, you stuff it in the zone and you compete. I’m proud of the fact that those guys buy into that.”

Overall, the message in Fayetteville is a relatively simple one. The Razorbacks want to develop a bevy of pitchers with good stuff who throw a lot of strikes.

“The stuff you were doing 20 years ago still works just as good as it did 20 years ago,” Hobbs said. “All the things we have and God bless the tech we have here—we have everything you can imagine—it comes down to can you compete, can you throw multiple pitches inside the strike zone, are you willing to not throw 2-0 fastballs all the time, can you throw offspeed pitches in the zone and are you willing to live with the results of being in the middle of the plate sometimes?

“Our guys, for the most part, have done a good job with all of that. Super proud of them after eight weeks.”

There’s a lot of baseball left to be played in 2024, but the Razorbacks have hit on a formula for success. They’re hoping it can take them back to Omaha and beyond.