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Each Monday or Tuesday throughout baseball season, HawgBeat’s Andrew Hutchinson will take a look back at the pitching staff for the previous week and assign each unit - the rotation and the bullpen - a grade on their performances.
Coming off a big weekend that shot it up the rankings, Arkansas returned home and had only a couple days off before beginning a four-game series against Southeast Missouri State.
It wasn’t a big-name opponent, but the Redhawks had a pair of left-handed starters who kept the Razorbacks’ bats quiet for several innings in the first two games of the series. That meant it was up to the pitching staff to keep the game within striking distance.
That’s just what they did, helping Arkansas pull off a sweep and slide into the No. 1 spot is a majority of the major college baseball polls.
“Overall, the pitching has been outstanding,” head coach Dave Van Horn said. “They’ve given the offense a chance to catch up, so to speak, a little bit and I think it’s just going to continue to get better and better, from what I’ve seen.”
Here’s the HawgBeat Pitching Report Card for the weekend…
Rotation: C
A quick glance at the overall numbers for the four starters this week would likely indicate a ‘D’ or maybe even ‘F’ grade, but that’d be lazy analysis - which isn’t what you’re here for. To get a better feel for how the rotation fared, it’s necessary to look at the circumstances surrounding each guy.
The only performance that really doesn’t need much explaining is Saturday’s outing by Peyton Pallette. The Benton native followed up his impressive debut vs. Texas with an equally impressive showing against SEMO.
Pallette pounded the strike zone, with only two of his 21 pitches in the first two innings being called balls, with what Van Horn described as a “classic arm action” that can be repeated. Although he can occasionally have a bad miss with his off-speed stuff, he rarely has any bad misses with his fastball, which sits in the mid-90s.
