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NEW USERS | RETURNING USERS

FAYETTEVILLE — Lost in the football team’s embarrassing loss to San Jose State last weekend was the return of Arkansas baseball.

Coming off back-to-back trips to the College World Series for the first time ever, the Razorbacks are a college baseball juggernaut. With touted prospects like Heston Kjerstad and Casey Martin returning, they will likely be a preseason top-10 team.

Fans’ first opportunity to catch them in action against another team since their season ended in Omaha was Friday night. In the second year the NCAA has allowed fall exhibitions, Arkansas hosted Oklahoma for a 14-inning scrimmage and lost 4-3.

HawgBeat was there for all 14 innings despite it lasting past midnight, providing play-by-play updates and commentary on The Trough and writing a free recap with a box score for the first nine innings.

Here are a few more detailed observations after talking to head coach Dave Van Horn following the exhibition…

Incredible Crowd

Despite the game being just an exhibition about five months before the regular season and during the middle of football season, Arkansas drew an estimated crowd of 6,378.

That number is likely pretty accurate because the ushers were using clickers as people entered the stadium, so it’s not a tickets sold number or the wildly inconsistent “tickets scanned” number from last season. There were some pockets of empty seats, but the sections in the main bowl stretching from foul pole to foul pole were pretty full.

It was an incredible crowd, to say the least. That has come to be expected for Baum-Walker Stadium, but even Van Horn was a little surprised.

“I didn’t know we were going to get this many people tonight,” Van Horn said. “Obviously we have a football game tomorrow, but there were a lot of people who came out on kind of a wet, windy day.

“I think the fact we had a good year last year, the fact we’re playing Oklahoma, people want to see what the new guys can do, but we appreciate it.”

To put that attendance in context…

~Four teams - LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Arkansas - averaged more fans during the 2019 season.

~Only 17 teams have a stadium capacity that would have fit that many fans.

~It would have been the season high for nine of 14 SEC teams in 2019, according to @SECbaseball on Twitter.

Young Arms

When asked what aspect of the exhibition he liked the most, Van Horn didn’t hesitate. Perhaps it was most fresh on his mind because they pitched the final few innings of a nearly five-hour exhibition, but he was pleased with how some of the lesser-used young pitchers looked against Oklahoma.

“The good things I saw were some of our young pitchers,” Van Horn said. “You look at Caden Monke, he’s a lot better pitcher this year than he was last year. … I saw a lot of good things from a lot of young pitchers.”