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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.

For the second time in three weeks, the Razorbacks matched a single-game school record against Murray State that they had reached just twice before during their illustrious history.

In the first of three wins over the Racers, Arkansas pitchers combined for 18 strikeouts on Friday. They also had 18 strikeouts against TCU on opening weekend, tying a mark set against Missouri State in 2009 and matched against Grand Canyon in 2017.

Those games weren’t flukes, either. The Razorbacks have racked up double-digit strikeouts in seven of their 10 games so far and one of the three times they failed to do so was the rain-shortened win over SEMO, when they had six in five innings.

Even with that shortened game, Arkansas pitchers have 117 total strikeouts through 10 games, which is well ahead of their pace when the single-season school record was broken in 2017 (107) and matched the following year (98).

“We have a lot of different style arms that we can run at you,” head coach Dave Van Horn said. “It just keeps teams off balance and we can do that all weekend at you. It doesn’t surprise me that we’re averaging maybe 10 strikeouts a game, somewhere in there, early this season.”

Here’s the HawgBeat Pitching Report Card for the Murray State series…

Had it not been for a tight strike zone from the home plate umpire in Game 1 of the series, Arkansas likely would have gotten two very good outings from its starters. Even with that, though, it was still a solid weekend for two-thirds of the rotation.

In his first time out as the Friday starter, Peyton Pallette looked like he could become the staff ace this season. His fastball was consistently in the mid-90s and even toughed 98 mph a couple of times in the first few innings before it dipped some in the third, but it was likely because of the miserable weather conditions - cold, wet and windy.

Van Horn said afterward that he believes Pallette’s velocity will tick up another notch or two once it gets warmer and as he continues to get stronger.

Unfortunately, he had to deal with the aforementioned tight zone, which led to a couple of walks that set up two-out RBIs for the Racers. He also threw some good breaking balls, but Van Horn added that he’d like for him to get his changeup going.

Still, his numbers through three starts (Pitcher A) are interesting to compare to the likes of Blaine Knight's first three starts in 2018 (Pitcher B) and Isaiah Campbell's first three starts in 2019 (Pitcher C)...