FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas' final signee in 2017 was the Razorbacks' first on the mound Wednesday at Baum Stadium.
Freshman Caleb Bolden pitched seven scoreless innings and Heston Kjerstad launched a towering home run over the scoreboard as the No. 8 Razorbacks defeated Louisiana-Monroe 4-0 before 2,056 fans.
The win gave Arkansas (21-9) a sweep of its two-game series with the Warhawks (15-14). Up next for the Razorbacks is a home series with No. 15 Auburn this weekend.
“Really good job by our pitcher Caleb Bolden,” Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn said. “We were hoping to get four, maybe five (innings) out of him and then kind of go from there.
“But he kind of got it rolling and gave us the sixth and seventh. He got a couple of big double-play balls…got himself out of a couple of jams by locating a couple of sinkers and fast balls and that gave him an opportunity to stay in the game and kept his pitch count down a little bit.”
Bolden (3-0, 2.61 ERA), from Pleasant Grove High School in Texarkana, Texas, allowed 7 hits, struck out 5 and didn't allow a walk.
“It felt really good, especially getting out there after Florida, rebounding like that,” said Bolden, who allowed three runs in one inning two weeks ago at Florida. “It felt really good to do that."
He now has thrown 13 straight scoreless innings as a starter.
“That’s a big confidence booster for me,” Bolden said. “I feel really good about it.”
Bolden was drafted in the 16th round of the 2017 Major League Baseball Draft by Tampa Bay, but chose to sign with the Razorbacks last summer instead of signing with the Rays or going to junior college.
“It is real big,” Van Horn said. “We had him in two or three times on unofficial visits, visited with him and showed him around. His velocity was 87 and we needed to see a little bit more and in May of his senior year here it came.
“We kind of had an idea more of where we were at with guys coming back and who was going to sign and it kind of opened up a spot where we made him an offer in late May or early June.
“He was thinking about going to junior college, thinking about signing and I think he made a good decision coming to school.”
Bolden, who was 26-2 while holding batters to a .151 batting average on the mound as a high school junior and senior, made it clear that he wanted to be a Razorback.
“This has always been my dream school, so when they called and said they had money open up, I was coming here,” Bolden said.
Kjerstad’s two-run homer - his team-leading eighth of the season - came in the second inning and were the only runs the Razorbacks needed.
He was sitting on a fastball and got one over the middle of the plate. Kjerstad extended his hit streak to 14 games, during which he is batting .439. He raised his season average to .400.
“I knew I squared it up, hit it pretty good and off the bat I could tell it was going out,” Kjerstad said. “But then I watched it a little bit and I surprised myself a little bit on how far it went once I saw it clear the scoreboard.”
Van Horn had no doubt it was gone off the bat.
“That was a no doubter, light wind kind of blowing across,” Van Horn said. “I don’t think the wind hurt it all, I think it might have helped it. Right when it left the bat, my comment was, 'That is not coming back.’ That was just so obvious on the field when it left.
"It just really exploded off the bat and he probably hit it 420 feet would be my guess. The exit velocity was pretty high I would say as well.”
Arkansas added two more runs in the sixth via a wild pitch that scored Dominic Fletcher and Evan Lee’s RBI single. Cody Scroggins pitched two innings in relief.
The Razorbacks outhit ULM 8-7 and did not commit an error, a welcome change from a night earlier when Arkansas had four errors in a sloppy 10-9 win in extra innings.
“We played really good defense which is really something that we needed,” Van Horn said. “Offensive end, we did just enough. I feel a lot of guys felt that the guys (pitchers) coming at us that everything was slow. They are not used to to seeing that too much. The timing wasn’t great but we did a good job of driving in some runs when we had the opportunity.”