No. 24 Arkansas baseball (29-16, 11-10 SEC) was feeling good after taking the first two games of the series against Missouri (21-23, 4-17 SEC), but couldn’t complete the sweep after laying an egg in a 6-1 loss in Saturday’s series finale.
Arkansas currently sits at No. 10 in the SEC after the Tigers snapped a nine-game head-to-head losing streak to win their first game against the Diamond Hogs since 2022. Arkansas only narrowly avoided giving Missouri its first SEC shutout in seven years, getting on the board in the ninth inning thanks to an RBI fielder’s choice by Zack Stewart.
The Razorbacks were a paltry 2 for 14 with runners on base and 1 for 5 with runners in scoring position. On the weekend, they posted a team batting average (.210) approaching the Mendoza line against a pitching staff with a 5.05 team ERA.
The Tigers scored only 10 runs across the three games, but they tended to strike early and often. Missouri tagged Hunter Dietz for 3 runs on 4 pitches in the first inning Thursday, but Razorback pitchers allowed just a single earned run over the next 17 innings thanks to a Friday shutout.
That came unraveled in a hurry when Missouri jumped all over starting pitcher Colin Fisher on Saturday, tagging him for 5 runs on 4 hits and a walk in just 1.1 innings of work.
Gabe Gaeckle, Parker Coil and Cooper Dossett combined for 6.2 innings of one-run ball out of the bullpen to keep Arkansas within striking distance, but the bats never made the necessary noise to spur a comeback.
It’s hard to blame pitching for a near scoreless loss, but Arkansas baseball coach Dave Van Horn put his team behind the eight ball with a pretty inexplicable decision.
Dave Van Horn’s Missouri Mistake
Fisher was pulled from the starting rotation after the Auburn series earlier this month. The southpaw threw 19 scoreless innings to begin the year, but allowed at least 3 earned runs in his next five starts, failing to make it out of the third inning in the latter three.
He allowed 6 runs, 4 of them earned, across 4.2 innings of relief work against Alabama and Georgia — Fisher threw three scoreless innings in a midweek start against Little Rock in between.
For some reason, Van Horn felt comfortable putting him back in the weekend rotation, a move that immediately proved to be a mistake. With all due respect to Fisher, who has been consistently excellent in non-conference and midweek action, there’s three years worth of evidence against him being an SEC-caliber pitcher.
