FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn said the season-ending injury to star right hander Peyton Pallette is a setback, but indicated Wednesday he thinks the Razorbacks still have plenty of arms to be strong in 2022.
Pallette, a junior from Benton, will undergo Tommy John surgery “in the next few days,” Van Horn said in a speech to the Hawgs Illustrated Sports Club. Prior to the injury, Pallette was rated the No. 1 college pitcher available for this year’s MLB Draft by Baseball America.
Van Horn said Pallette began feeling tightness in his elbow after he returned to campus about two weeks ago. Pallette injured the elbow during a relief appearance against Florida last May, but was told last summer he could rehab the injury with multiple months of rest.
Van Horn said Pallette was throwing "great" during fall practice.
“It’s a baseball thing. It happens,” Van Horn said. “It’s not helping our team, that’s for sure, but we’ll survive. We’ll fight through it.”
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Van Horn said Pallette has remained upbeat since finding out he will not pitch in 2022. Pallette started 11 games last season and was a projected weekend starter again.
“Even after the diagnosis, he’s still out there taking ground balls, working with our pitchers, working in the weight room,” Van Horn said. “That’s good for him. That’s good therapy for him.”
During his 50-minute speech and question-and-answer session, Van Horn highlighted several pitchers on this year’s roster, including many who he said are improved since last year.
Van Horn called fourth-year right hander Connor Noland “better than ever.” He also cited improvement in right handers Evan Gray and Mark Adamiak, and left handers Zack Morris and Evan Taylor, among others.
Van Horn said the Razorbacks also expect to get innings from a pair of pitchers who missed last season due to surgeries — right hander Issac Bracken, a graduate transfer from Northern Colorado, and redshirt freshman left hander Nick Griffin, a Monticello native who was one of Arkansas’ top recruits in the class of 2020.
“He’s thrown two or three times now live to hitters, 93-94 (mph), nothing but strikes, good slider, left handed,” Van Horn said. “He’s on his way back because there’s a lot more left in there. He’s a big, tall kid, too.
“We’re hoping this is a guy who can help pick up some of the slack for Peyton and anybody else that goes down. You’ve got to have guys step up. We’ve got plenty of guys. It’s just a matter of figuring out where we’re going to use them all.”
Among freshman pitchers, Van Horn indicated left hander Hagen Smith and right hander Nick Moten will see time on the mound early in the season. He said right hander Brady Tygart was limited to one inning of work in fall scrimmages due to an injury, but pitched recently at 96 mph.
“It looks like he’s going to be OK,” Van Horn said.
Other new pitchers mentioned by Van Horn were right handers Austin Ledbetter, Vincent Trapani and Jake Faherty, and junior-college transfer Dylan Carter, a right hander from Bentonville who was 8-1 as a starter at Crowder (Mo.) College last season.
“The pitching is what we have to really figure out how we want to handle it,” Van Horn said. “We have a lot of really good arms, guys that can pitch, but they haven’t pitched in the SEC. They’ve got to learn how to pitch in front of 8,000 to 10,000 people and they’ve got to learn how to pitch to older kids all the time in league play.
“Some of our younger guys are some of our best pitchers. I’m going to do everything I can to be patient and (pitching coach Matt) Hobbs is, too….We will figure it out and we need to have it figured out by the time we play Kentucky in our first series in SEC play in the middle of March.”
The Razorbacks are scheduled to begin preseason team practice Friday and scrimmage for the first time Saturday at 1 p.m.