Dave Van Horn stresses the importance of young arms for Arkansas

Dave Van Horn’s preference, as the Arkansas head coach, is to build a squad with a heavy dose of young prospects out of high school who come to Fayetteville and grow for a few years before getting drafted. And this applies to pitchers, especially.

After a season where injuries decimated the Razorbacks staff behind ace Hagen Smith, Van Horn is hopeful to not only add talent but build depth with the new faces joining some key returners. All that stands in his way now is seeing who might get picked in the 2024 MLB Draft and potentially sign with a pro franchise.

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It’s just another challenge as Van Horn tries to build Arkansas up with the type of pitchers he knows the Razorbacks need.

“We say it every year here: We’re still going to try to build this program as best we can around young players,” Van Horn said. “Get the quality kids from high school, get them here, get them to the draft. Last year the draft crushed us with position players. We got a few pitchers through, obviously, and they helped us. If Hunter Dietz could’ve stayed healthy and Colin Fisher could’ve stayed healthy, who knows where we would’ve been.

“We might’ve been able to have a No. 2, a No. 3 that could’ve helped Hagen a lot more, honestly. Because that’s kind of what faded on us there, pretty much in May, with some starting pitching. It just kind of went away, honestly. Bullpen was good. But you’ve gotta have those young guys continue to get better.”

The Razorbacks head man went on to praise the improvements and work from some of the younger pitchers Arkansas expects to have back for 2025, noting the achievements from the likes of Tate McGuire and Gabe Gaeckle during their respective summer league outings so far.

If all goes to plan, Van Horn and Co. will have a talent, deep pitching staff with the mix of young prospects and veterans that the new pitchers can follow to learn the model and how things work in the Arkansas program.

“You’ve gotta have really good players,” Van Horn said. “And we feel like we’ve got a couple, three really good high school arms coming in, if we can get a couple of them through the draft and a couple older kids come in and help us out, we’ll have a really good pitching staff again next year and I think it’ll be one that’s probably a little more consistent.”