Clay Henry: Do the Hogs have “outliers” on the 2025 pitching staff?

By Clay Henry, Hogs+ Senior Contributor

When I asked Arkansas pitching coach Matt Hobbs if he liked a mix of pitches heavy on the fastball side or off speed, the answer was pretty close to “it depends.”

It depends on what sort of fastball a pitcher throws and how good they are with an assortment of off-speed pitches.

For example, do they have a pitch that is an outlier?

Do they have a Mariano Rivera cutter? Or, maybe it’s a Steve Carlton slider that dives at your ankles? Do they have an alien pitch like Kevin Kopps that dives into the strike zone in an unhittable manner?

So when I tried to pin Hobbs down during our interview on Hogs+, he emphasized that his goal is “somewhere in between extremes.”

I noted that Dave Jorn, who coached pitchers for both Norm DeBriyn and Dave Van Horn, emphasized throwing fastballs on the outside of the plate.

“Well, Coach Jorn was the best ever here,” Hobbs said. “The fastball is still the most important pitch you throw because you shape everything off of that pitch. I just say you can’t be one-dimensional.

“Baseball at all levels has moved more to off-speed pitches,” Hobbs said. “I just think each guy has to figure out what he can do to induce soft contact, get a swing and miss, and how to use his individual strengths. They are all different.”

Hobbs also noted that statistical data gives you an average. In other words, many pitchers fall outside those ranges.

“We’ve got some guys who throw 65 percent heaters,” he said. “Some guys have to throw 65 percent off-speed.”

Hobbs said the data is consistent around the top leagues in college baseball

“The good SEC, ACC, and Big 12 teams are going to have a pitching staff that is probably 52 percent fastballs, 48 percent off-speed,” Hobbs said. “But you might have certain pitchers that be an outlier.”

The top pitcher for the Hogs last year is a great example: Hagen Smith’s slider would fall into that category. The lefty flame thrower did have a Carlton-type slider. He used it as the primary pitch to record 17 strikeouts against Oregon State in his second outing last year.

From that game forward, the National Pitcher of the Year award was Smith’s to lose. He did not.

Smith had an outstanding fastball, a true outlier. But because of the electric slider, the fastball was used only 54 percent of the time.

“You’d think with that fastball, Hagen might have been 60 percent with it,” Hobbs said.

Smith could get you out with the fastball, but it might be with contact. The slider was more of a swing-and-miss pitch.

An outlier, says the dictionary, is a pitch that is markedly different than the others in the sample.

Hobbs consistently finds pitchers that either have an outlier pitch or he and the Arkansas coaching staff tinker with grips and arm slots until one appears.

The way Kevin Kopps exploded in year six with a pitch that was somewhere between a cutter and a slider is the best example. He won both the Golden Spikes and Dick Howser Awards as the nation’s top player.

Hobbs all but predicted a breakout season with Kopps in late January of 2021. He said we’d all be “writing feature stories about Kopps” by season’s end. No one has made a more accurate prediction. Hobbs also predicted greatness for Smith last year, but so was everyone else.

“Making that statement about Kopps might go down as dumb luck,” Hobbs said. “But everything he was doing that fall and again when we came back for the spring pointed to greatness. We track so much data that we sort of know.”

You know the next question: Who on the 2025 squad can do something similar to Kopps and Smith? Can Hobbs develop a third National Pitcher of the Year?

I let Hobbs off the hook by loosening the timeline on the question. Might someone on this roster earn such an honor before they finish at Arkansas? I didn’t make him pick the top National Player of the Year candidate just one week before the season opener with Washington State on Friday.

“You can look at this roster and see where some of these guys rank as far as their draft stock within their class,” Hobbs said. “Some of these guys are ranked really high.

“What I always talk about is how are they going to handle the pressure that comes with that sort of ranking? There is going to be adversity.

“Hagen had it. He goes out for his first outing and lasted one inning. It wasn’t because it was cold (although it was frigid). It was because he didn’t pitch good.

“So he’s got adversity at the very start for a seven-day window. People questioned and said he was going to be a bust.”

That went away when he recorded 17 strikeouts against a highly regarded Oregon State offense the next week in Arlington, Texas.

The Arkansas coaching staff saw that coming.

“We could see it was going to be a good outing,” Hobbs said. “It was his bullpen (in midweek) and just the way he attacked adversity.”

Sophomore Gabe Gaeckle, effective last year as a closer, is getting massive hype as he moves into the starting rotation. He has made many of the preseason All-America teams.

“Gabe will have an outing that’s not good,” Hobbs said. “He is going to have to decide if that defines him or not.

“I will say Gabe is talented enough to become one of those guys (like Kopps and Smith). It will just be how he handles adversity. We all face it at some point in baseball.

“I like to show our young guys (stats and video) of some guys here before them like a Kevin Kopps, Hagen Smith, Isaiah Campbell, and Connor Noland. They all remember how they looked at the end, but they all fought through adversity when they first got here.

“You don’t show up here and roll out as the finished product. It’s about how they work and develop.”

The culture of the Arkansas program has always been about hard work and development. The recruiting classes have risen of late, but Hobbs points to the culture as a huge positive for the team.

“Your culture should not graduate or be drafted,” he said. “You look at what is going on with the portal, you could say, ‘Let’s just go replace them all.’ It could be like free agency and that might work at the big league level where you might have seven years of (MLB) data.

“We don’t have enough information to do that and (safeguard the culture). So you bring in good young players and develop them. You coach them really hard. Some might say you can’t because they’ll leave.

“We look at the other way. They come here to get better, to develop. If you don’t coach ‘em hard and they don’t improve, they’ll leave. They want to get better.”

Hobbs is pleased with the overall depth and strength of the pitching staff and that goes for a talented group of portal finds along with some sterling freshmen to mix in with solid returnees.

With a heavy dose of information on the battle for the starting rotation between Gage Wood, Zach Root, Landon Beidelschies, and Gaeckle, Hobbs went through the pitching staff in detail in a one-hour sit-down. You’ll learn who on the staff has an alien pitch and who has an outlier.

Per the usual from Hobbs, it’s a can’t miss video to prepare Hogs+ subscribers for another fun year of Arkansas baseball.