Dave Van Horn talks managing Arkansas baseball roster turnover in 2023

Arkansas had a lot of roster turnover going into 2023 after the Razorbacks finished third at last year’s College World Series. Head coach Dave Van Horn was pretty honest about this year’s squad.

“You recruit certain types of players to play a certain way,” Van Horn said on Sirius XM SEC Radio. “Maybe a style that you know, we like kids that can hit the ball over your head offensively, hit doubles, doubles turn into home runs, so we want some kids that have some strength. We tried to develop that here with our strength program, but you still have to stay athletic. There’s not too many kids like my third baseman last year Cayden Wallace. You’re talking about an athletic kid with power and that’s what goes in the first and second round in the draft. 

“If we sneak those guys into college, that’s a good thing. We just have to coach him and the other ones a little more (so there’s) development going on as far as the strength part.”

Dave Van Horn honest about Arkansas roster turnover

Van Horn also talked about Arkansas’ pitching staff as far as it’s concerned from last year compared to this season.

“But our pitching staff is what we have,” Van Horn said. “You know, we feel like we have a little bit more depth than maybe we had last year. Although some of our older kids haven’t pitched well right out of the gate. So we’re hoping that’ll kick in and then when we lost Jaxon Wiggins, you know he was going to be a weekend starter (but lost him to) Tommy John (surgery) and that came out of nowhere. He was great in the fall and hadn’t even really thrown yet this January, February. Couple of light bullpens, so who knows where that happened. And he actually had surgery yesterday. 

“We figured that took about 80 to 100 innings away from us right there. So you just have to battle that and you know, at this level, you can’t dip down into the minor leagues and find a guy or make a trade you got what you got. But I feel like that you just have to work on what you’re good at and you’re gonna make adjustments and the players are going to show you what we’re good at and then we move in that direction.”

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Van Horn and Arkansas are 4-1 in the early goings of the 2023 season.