Van Horn: 'You can’t take anybody lightly'
Arkansas baseball is the No. 3 national seed for the 2023 NCAA Tournament, but head coach Dave Van Horn is making sure to keep his team's mindset right entering the regional round.
The Razorbacks are set to host the Fayetteville Regional at Baum-Walker Stadium this weekend and a pair of conference tournament champions — 2-seed TCU and 4-seed Santa Clara — are joined by a 3-seed Arizona that barely snuck into the tournament and has a chip on its shoulder.
A veteran when it comes to coaching in the postseason, Van Horn said Thursday that he believes his team drew one of the two hardest regional fields in the tournament.
"I know that I thought how could it be tougher?" Van Horn said. "When I look at the teams. When I look at the numbers Arizona has put up this year. And they were a team that didn’t know if they were going to get in, so they were probably extremely excited.
"TCU’s on fire. I mean they beat us as bad as we’ve been beaten all year the second game of the year. I mean they hammered us. Just flat out hammered us. And you know, then they ran off some more wins. Then they kind of went the other way. That’s what baseball does to you. Who knows what got it going."
According to a model ran by Parker Fleming, who works in data science, Arkansas' probability of making the College World Series is ranked 15th of the 16 teams hosting a regional.
The model shows that Arkansas has just a 22.2% chance of making it to Omaha for the second straight season and that's a product of the tough draw the Hogs received in their regional.
"You know, word on the street is the team you don’t want to play right now is TCU," Van Horn said. "They’re on fire. And so I would have to say this regional is in the top two as far as toughness. I don’t know who’s harder, me looking at them. I haven’t seem all of them actually play on the field."
After a 1-8 stretch from April 21-30, the Horned Frogs really turned things around in the second half of the season to win 14 of their last 16 games.
Arizona made a run to the Pac-12 tournament championship, a game it lost to Oregon. The Wildcats rank 45th in the RPI and their strength of schedule was 27th this season.
"To me it looks like Arizona will try to out-slug you," Van Horn said. "Doesn’t mean they can’t pitch. They play in Arizona so the ball travels so their pitchers’ ERAs are probably going to be higher than they would be if they played here or in the Midwest or out East or whatever."
The team in front of Arkansas is Santa Clara, which Fleming's model gives a 12.8% chance to win the Fayetteville Regional — the highest of any 4-seed in the tournament.
"What we found out about them is what we knew about them, probably, by just looking at their overall statistics," Van Horn said. "They’re playing extremely well right now down the stretch. They didn’t win the regular season championship, but they just basically blew through the field in the tournament championship. They’re scoring.
"We know about their arms. We know the velocities. They’re good. They’re older. If you look at their roster, they’re older. They’ve got a good mix of left and right handed hitters. Got a couple of guys in the bullpen that are really good and they’ve got one that throws 100 miles an hour."
This season, head coach Rusty Filter's squad led the WCC with a 4.42 team ERA and they ranked second in the conference with 8.70 strikeouts per nine innings. The Broncos ranked second in the WCC with a team batting average of .300 and they ranked third in runs scored (379) and home runs (72).
Santa Clara enters the postseason on an eight-game winning streak and it has won 17 of its last 20. The 35 wins so far this season are the most since the 1997 campaign, when the team won 41.
Van Horn knows well that a 4-seed can surprise him and you can just look back to the last regional Arkansas hosted for an example of that. The Razorbacks trailed NJIT, 3-2, after three innings during the 2021 Fayetteville Regional and they even had to throw Kevin Kopps for 2 1/3 relief innings in that game.
"You don’t show panic," Van Horn said of the mindset entering the regional. "You just go do what you do. You’re there for a reason: because you’ve had a good season. You’ve earned it and you just try to take the pressure off the players as much as possible and tell them to enjoy it, but you’ve got to get after it.
"You can’t take anybody lightly, because if you do, these teams are good. If you open the door, they’re going to kick it in and you’re in trouble and you’re going to have to fight."
Van Horn said he intends to start junior left-hander Hunter Hollan against Santa Clara on Friday. Hollan owns an 8-2 record and 4.06 ERA in 77 2/3 innings pitched this season.
The last outing for Hollan was his first out of the bullpen since his junior year of high school, according to him, and he fared well against a potent LSU lineup at the SEC Tournament. Hollan threw 5 1/3 innings of relief and gave up two earned runs on six hits, walked one and struck out eight.
"Pitches with a little bit of an attitude and fields his position pretty good," Van Horn said of Hollan. "He’s a confident guy. I’ve said it three times now. I just like what he takes out there when he gets the ball you know. When it doesn’t go good you can live with it as a coach."
After dealing with what Van Horn described as shin splints and Hollan described as a pinched nerve for a portion of the second half the season, the Arkansas skipper said Hollan is doing much better.
"Yeah, he’s a lot better," Van Horn said. "A lot, like it’s probably just about gone. It was actually starting to get better when he pitched really well here about three weeks ago and then - was that South Carolina maybe? - and then it bothered him a little bit after that and then it got better. I think it’s continued as far as what I was told yesterday that he’s feeling really good."
Arkansas will begin regional play Friday at 2 p.m. CT against Santa Clara at Baum-Walker Stadium in Fayetteville. The game will be streamed on ESPN+.