Feral

Sort of borne out in the portal rankings last year. Not a single Omaha team in the top 10 of last year’s portal rankings. LSU was #12, we were #15, and that was about it.

Meanwhile Georgia was #1 in the portal rankings and is seeing that come to fruition.

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Yet even among it all, it's still another year we can say at least we aren't Florida State.

It's insane what the program continues to endure.

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Link Jarrett was an incredible hire for them and still apparently picked right up where Mike Martin left off.

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Here's my prediction, we'll hard commit on pitching in the portal and end up with a decent starting rotation and some relatively good bullpen depth and wind up with an offense that will average 3.8 runs per game.

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Unfortunately I think you’re spot on.

The offense wasn’t good this year, but the fact that pitching and defense were such glaring issues tells me DVH will probably over-index towards those 2 in the portal.

Next year could be similar to 2023 when we had really good pitching and defense but had some guys like Parker Rowland and John Bolton who were all glove and no bat.

A strikeout by TJ Pompey is a fitting end to this shitshow of a season.

I liked some of the one year portal guys from the 2023 and 2024 teams that didn’t even make it out of a regional.

I liked Jared Wegner. I really liked Tavian Josenberger. I liked Hudson White. I liked guys like Hunter Hollan and Mason Molina. I liked Jared Sprague-Lott.

I really dislike Niu and Stewart and am glad to see them go. I’ll be glad to see Pompey portal on out.

Keep Ruiz, Kozeal, and Souza and start over.

ESPN just flashed a graphic that Helfrick is their #6 draft prospect.

El. Oh. El.

Unbelievable that this is the staff DVH and Hobbs decided to roll into the season with.

Correction to my earlier post - Stewart is still in the lineup, just moved to DH. Rutenbar sitting. Turner to RF.

More context on how bad the offense has been this season.

LINK

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With 3 hits, 3 walks, 1 HBP, and 1 reaching on error, Arkansas had a total of 8 baserunners tonight.

That's the 6th game this season with 8 or fewer baserunners, which is the most times an Arkansas team has done it since 2017.

2026: 6
2025: 3
2024: 3
2023: 2
2022: 4
2021: 3
2019: 5
2018: 5
2017: 10

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So we can’t recruit and no one gets better?

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That was the biggest issue with this team.

We recruited horribly, and no one seemed to develop from last year.

Helfrick seemed to have gotten worse. Same for Aloy. Robinett fell off a cliff this year (and has never been good). Kozeal was good last year and is good again than year - we’ll miss him when he moves on. Souza seem to be the only guy to have taken a bit of a step forwards, but he still isn’t the player we thought he was as a freshman. Brumbaugh was a highly touted freshman and was horrendous.

In terms of pitching, no one got better. Dietz simply got and stayed healthy and was the pitcher they’ve been saying he was for 3 years. Gibler seemed to have gotten worse. Gaeckle seemed to have regressed as well.

My main issue is the type of players we’re recruiting.

DVH said after the 2023 and 2024 years when we were littered with automatic outs in the lineup that he said “never again” and went and loaded up on bats in the portal. Davalon hit nearly .400 at his last school. Maxwell hit .330 at TCU. Iredale was a great hitter. Guess what, they hit here. Good hitters hit regardless of where they are. Conversely, we recruited guys like Stewart and Niu who hit .250 at their former schools, and (shocker!) they’re .250 hitters here.

The other issue is that he pulled zero starters from the portal. The last several years we’ve landed guys like Hunter Hollan, Root, Biedelschies, Mason Molina, and even Aiden Jimenez who could spot start to fill out our rotation. But somehow they thought they’d be good with Dietz (who was still a question mark coming into this year), trying yet again to make Gaeckle a starter, and Colin Fisher. That’s simply unbelievable.

The problem is when a pitcher can locate our approach causes us to get into way too many disadvantage counts by watching strike 1, swinging at bad pitches on strike 2, and then having to shift into protect mode.

The other inherent problem with our approach is we have 4 guys who are the epitome of guess hitters in Stewart, Pompey, Helfrick, and Robinett who swing and miss a ton. It’s difficult to work counts and foul pitches off when your bat misses the ball as much as we do. I don’t know where to find Whiff Rate, but I’d hazard a guess those guys lead the team, and in that order.

We also have some guys who press really badly with RISP and ultimately come up short when there’s anyone on base. Helfrick is one who’s really bad about this, ditto for Pompey. We need to drive in the runner on 2nd and they’re trying to hit a 6 run homer.