Dave Van Horn criticizes midweek scheduling of college baseball

The Arkansas Razorbacks played a two-game midweek series in between key SEC series against Texas A&M and Florida respectively last week. It’s a reality of the college baseball schedule that head coach Dave Van Horn knows he needs to navigate, even if it’s easy to be critical of.

Van Horn shared after run-ruling Little Rock in the first of two games that there are potentially no advantages of playing that midweek series. However, it’s a reality of the schedule that the Razorbacks need to get their games in when they can.

“Maybe none,” Dave Van Horn said. “Maybe getting some guys some work, maybe wearing your team out. But the problem is, you’re supposed to schedule 56 games. It’s hard to get 56 games. Fayetteville is not easy to get to. It’s not like you can run down the highway and go play all these schools. When you’re at some of the schools in our league, you can run down the road 20 minutes, 15 minutes and play some Division I schools all around town. Can’t do that here. When you get a team that’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’ll play you two’ That’s two off of 56.”

Arkansas has found plenty of success in non-conference play this season, going 23-2 in those games so far this season. That’s included three two-game midweek series so far this season. They’ve won all of those games to this point.

“We got 30 conference, so we got to schedule 26 non-conference games. At least that’s the way I figure it. We try to do it. I would rather not play two at this time of year,” Van Horn said. “But if we do play two, it’s nice when you can play seven innings and only use three pitchers. The two that threw there today were not going to throw tomorrow if they didn’t throw tonight. The other schools play two, but a lot of them play early. We have trouble getting teams to play us two early. Then the other issue is our weather, it’s not like we know it’s going to be 70 and sunny like it is in San Diego. You just get em when you can. Some years it’s a good thing, some years it’s not.”

It’s possible the busy schedule is starting to take its toll on the Razorbacks. Dave Van Horn has seen his team now lose three straight SEC series. That includes those series to Texas A&M and Florida respectively. With that, they’ve fallen to 14-7 in SEC play. That’s good for a tie for second with LSU and is five games behind Texas.

“I didn’t like playing Friday, Saturday, Sunday last weekend and playing extra innings on Sunday, playing a team that’s playing Thursday, Friday, Saturday. They sat at home and their pitcher was a lot more rested than mine. We played seven games in eight days. So, you can tell how I feel about all this. It’s just the way you do,” Van Horn said. “Because that’s what the schedule tells you to do. It’s baseball. It’s the ups and downs of the game. You win and lose. You can call it a skid, you can call it whatever you want. I call it baseball.”

This upcoming week, Arkansas will only play one midweek game. After that, Dave Van Horn and his Razorbacks will have a massive set of SEC series against Texas and LSU. So, that difficult schedule isn’t going to take it easy on the Razorbacks anytime soon.