FAYETTEVILLE — The Arkansas Razorbacks conducted a long, sorrowful farewell in short left field on Sunday night.
The depth of their pain and the power of their emotions ran parallel to the magnitude of the sting of the University of Arkansas’ 3-2 loss to underdog North Carolina State.
While the Razorbacks were ripping and roaring from the opening gate this season, seizing a unanimous No. 1 ranking in the early going and taking almost every SEC team’s best shot en route to the regular-season and tournament championships, North Carolina State clunked to a 1-8 start in Atlantic Coast Conference play and peaked down the stretch.
There’s a deep well to the season of firsts for Coach Dave Van Horn’s Hogs — first 50-win season on his watch, first SEC Tournament title, first national No. 1 seed and first time to fall in a super regional at home.
Asked how he would put the season in perspective, Van Horn referred to the comments he made to the team during the lengthy left-field conference.
“They showed up every weekend and played hard, practiced hard,” Van Horn said. “When they stepped on the field, they really wanted to win. You don’t see that all the time, week in and week out, teams fighting like this team fought.
“Our team, we really don’t have a bunch of superstars. We’ve got some good players. You’ve got some guys that are going to be drafted, but we didn’t have that first-round-type guy or first-round arm.
“We’ve just got a bunch of good players that played hard. They won a regular-season SEC championship and they won the conference tournament for the first time ever here. Those are things that I think will stand out to me when I take a little time to really think about it.”
The Razorbacks (50-13) invested a great deal of emotional and mental capital in the last few weeks of SEC play. It started with the road series at No. 4 Tennessee, the home sweep of No. 9 Florida, and the four-game sweep at the SEC Tournament, including wins over No. 3 Vanderbilt and No. 11 Ole Miss.
Were the Hogs running short on energy after that long stretch of staying on edge series after series throughout the record-breaking year?
That’s impossible to measure but equally hard to dismiss as a contributing factor in the series loss to North Carolina State.
Van Horn did not delve into the particulars of where Arkansas fell short in the super regional, its only losing weekend in 17 tries this season.
“It didn’t go our way,” he said. “We just didn’t do much offensively. We got four hits, and hit two or three or four other balls hard. They were at people. But we just couldn’t get that big hit to put us over the top really the last couple of days.”
After blasting out 17 hits, including 4 home runs and 10 for extra bases, in Friday’s 21-2 rout, the Hogs’ bats fell silent.
Arkansas hit .227 during the postseason, 40 points lower than its final season average of .267.
While the Razorbacks pounded out a school-record 109 home runs, walked 360 times (one shy of the school record of 361 in 1985) and slugged .482, they also struck out 567 times (14 short of the school record of 581 in 2019) and did not play much station-to-station baseball. North Carolina State won the super regional final with a pair of home runs, but its 6-5 win while facing elimination on Saturday was chock-full of small-ball successes.
Van Horn and assistant coaches Nate Thompson and Matt Hobbs have been recruiting like gangbusters for a number of years, so the talent spigot is still turned on high. It appears as if the incoming standouts will have to make big contributions in 2022 after the Razorbacks benefited from the extra roster space and veterans to fill them due to covid-19 allowances this year.
So many of the team’s best players are likely to have thrown their last pitch or hit their last home run that it’s almost dizzying to contemplate.
Pitchers Kevin Kopps, Patrick Wicklander, Zebulon Vermillion, Caleb Bolden, Kole Ramage and others might have played their final games, though the extra season allowed by the NCAA could come into play for some of them.
On the offensive side, Casey Opitz, Christian Franklin, Brady Slavens, Matt Goodheart, Jalen Battles, Cullen Smith and others stand a chance of being through with their college careers.
The MLB Draft being shortened to 20 rounds, combined with the NCAA’s bonus year offering, makes it hard to project who will stay and who will go.
The Razorbacks seemed like a team of destiny most of the season. They had their ace Kopps on the hill for their finale, but they could not score enough to win their third consecutive trip to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.
That will sting in Razorback Country for a long time.