FAYETTEVILLE – The 2023 Arkansas baseball season has come to end. Key injuries to the pitching staff and others on the roster finally became too much for the Razorbacks in the finals of the NCAA Regional.
Arkansas (43-18) concluded the campaign with a 12-4 loss against TCU (40-22) in the NCAA Fayetteville Regional championship round on Monday afternoon at Baum-Walker Stadium. With the loss, the Razorbacks, the No. 3 overall seed in this year’s NCAA Tournament, failed to advance out of the regional round for the first time since 2017.
Playing its third game in 24 hours, Arkansas came out energized and took an early lead. The first three Razorback batters reached and loaded the bases for Ben McLaughlin, who drove home the first run on his sacrifice fly to left.
TCU took the lead with two runs in the bottom half of the second, but Arkansas came roaring back in the fifth inning. Back-to-back home runs by Jace Bohrofen, who clobbered his team-leading 16th homer of the year off the batter’s eye, and Jared Wegner, who swatted his 15th of the season, propelled the Hogs back to a 4-2 advantage.
Bohrofen finished the game 1-for-3 with two RBI, concluding the year with a team-leading .318/.436/.612 slash line. He racked up a team-best 31 extra-base hits, including 15 doubles, and 52 RBI, second most among all Razorback hitters.
Hagen Smith, who entered in relief of starter Cody Adcock in the second inning, kept the Horned Frogs at bay over his 3 2/3 innings of work on the mound. The left-hander struck out six while allowing just one run, finishing his All-America campaign with a team-leading 109 strikeouts over 71 2/3 innings on the year.
After Smith departed, however, TCU broke through for nine more runs against the Arkansas bullpen. The Horned Frogs used a three-run sixth and a five-run eighth to put the game away for good, sealing their 12-4 regional-clinching win.
Led by 2023 SEC Coach of the Year Dave Van Horn, Arkansas finished the season with 43 overall wins, the program’s sixth consecutive 40-win season (excluding the shortened 2020 campaign). The Hogs, who won an SEC championship for the fourth time in school history, tallied 32 wins at Baum-Walker Stadium, their third-most home victories in a season.
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Note to Our Readers: Parts of the previous story were sourced directly from the University of Arkansas Office of Communications, Oliver Grigg.
