Freshman Turner hits 410-foot walk-off to save Arkansas

Nobody handed Arkansas anything Sunday afternoon at Baum-Walker Stadium and maybe that’s exactly what this team needed.

A freshman who hadn’t recorded a hit since April 10 stepped into the batter’s box with the Hogs trailing by a run in the bottom of the ninth.

He battled through seven pitches, fouled off consecutive offerings and took one off his foot while the Razorbacks’ crowd rose to its feet around him.

Then Christian Turner turned on a slider from Ole Miss reliever Walker Hooks and sent it 410 feet to right-center field and suddenly Arkansas had a 5-4 victory and a series win over the 18th-ranked Rebels.

That’s the version of this team that can go toe-to-toe with anybody in the Southeastern Conference.

The other version, the one that went down 3-1 on a cheapie wind-blown shot to left field and watched the lead evaporate in the eighth inning, that one’s been showing up a lot more often lately.

Both teams were on display Sunday in front of 9,891 fans in Fayetteville. That’s been the story of the 22nd-ranked Razorbacks all spring.

Freshman who wasn’t afraid of moment

Turner had been ice cold at the plate.

The 19-year-old right fielder entered the game as a pinch runner in the seventh inning and was batting for the first time when he dug in against Hooks in the ninth.

There was no reason to expect anything heroic from a kid who hadn’t collected a hit in nearly a month.

He watched Nolan Souza work an eight-pitch at-bat against the left-handed Hooks and picked up something valuable from the dugout.

“I saw every pitch and every one of them, just about, was a slider, except for the fastball he took for a ball,” Turner said. “I knew going into that at-bat that I was going to get a lot of sliders.”

Turner swung through the first pitch and fouled off the next one trying to bunt.

He nearly went deep on the first 0-2 pitch but the southwest wind hooked his line drive just foul down the left field line.

He took a pitch to get to 1-2, then fouled off back-to-back offerings — one off his foot — before he crushed the pitch that ended the game.

Hogs coach Dave Van Horn didn’t see a rattled kid up there. He saw someone locked in.

“To me, it was like a fearless at-bat,” Van Horn said. “It was like the moment wasn’t too big for him. He just kept fighting, the dugout was fighting, the fans start cheering. They were behind him and that was really good to hear when our fans started. I know his adrenaline was rolling and it might have got him over the hump.”

Turner became the first Razorback to hit a walk-off home run in a rubber match since Heston Kjerstad went deep in March 2020.

The last time Arkansas pulled off a walk-off homer in an SEC series finale was Collin Kuhn’s grand slam in a 17-16 win over Kentucky on Easter Sunday 2010.

Turner acknowledged he’d hit a game-winning shot before, at Haughton High School in Louisiana, but said it wasn’t close to this.

When everything nearly fell apart

The eighth inning very nearly ruined everything.

Hooks had just escaped a seventh-inning bases-loaded jam by striking out Camden Kozeal and Maika Niu back to back — Niu’s fourth strikeout of the game — and momentum felt like it was shifting.

Then Judd Utermark led off the eighth against Arkansas closer Ethan McElvain and hit a 416-foot blast to center field, his 48th career home run, to put Ole Miss back in front 4-3.

In the dugout, the Hogs didn’t fold. At least that’s what they want you to believe.

“We kept our spirits up in there,” Van Horn said. “We told them before the game and I didn’t need to tell them how important the game was. I just told them, ‘You guys wanted to play in the Southeastern Conference. You wanted to play in games like this.'”

That kind of moment has been the dividing line between the good version of this team and the version that gets smoked 11-4, which is exactly what Ole Miss did to them Saturday.

The Rebels torched the Hogs a day earlier, but Van Horn noted there was value in that loss.

Getting Hooks into Saturday’s game, making him work, putting a little wear on his arm before he’d have to come back out Sunday — that was part of the plan.

“We always tell the guys all that stuff matters,” Van Horn said. “Everything adds up and I think yesterday, getting him in the game, starting a threat a little bit, all of a sudden now he’s out there twice and we’ve seen him.”

Aloy’s monster shot ties it up

Before Turner’s heroics could mean anything, the Hogs had to claw back from a 3-1 hole. They did it with the long ball.

Zack Stewart cut the deficit to 3-2 in the fifth inning with a wind-aided 339-foot shot to left against Ole Miss starter Taylor Rabe.

Then Kuhio Aloy absolutely obliterated one in the sixth, a 469-foot blast that landed inside a food truck in the Hog Pen.

Aloy’s shot registered at 117 mph exit velocity off the TrackMan system — the hardest recorded exit velocity for an Arkansas home run — and it tied the game at 3-3.

It was the longest home run by a Razorback since Jared Wegner went 470 feet against Auburn in 2023.

Van Horn had thoughts on the truck.

“I would say the owner of that truck ought to keep that ball,” he said.

Aloy also drove in the game’s first run with an RBI single in the bottom of the first.

Damian Ruiz led off with a single, swiped second and came around to score. It was a clean, efficient inning that set the tone — before Ole Miss answered immediately in the second with Owen Paino’s 323-foot homer to left that looked routine off the bat until the crosswind grabbed it.

“That’s the scary one, when they hit them high and the wind is blowing across,” Van Horn said. “It didn’t blow foul, it stayed fair, and all of a sudden we’re down [3-1] after working hard to score that run.”

Pitching staff held when it had to

Starter Gabe Gaeckle wasn’t brilliant in his return to the rotation — it’d been his first start since April 2 at Auburn — but he was functional enough.

He went four innings, allowed three runs (two earned), struck out five and threw 74 pitches.

Van Horn confirmed Gaeckle’ll be back in the rotation next week against Oklahoma.

The unsung piece Sunday was Parker Coil, who threw three scoreless innings with three strikeouts to bridge the gap. McElvain took his lumps in the eighth but got back-to-back outs in the ninth to set up the rally, earning his fourth win of the season.

“It’s just a good feeling,” Coil said. “It’s not really gone our way, so to finally see one of those go our way. I think we take that momentum into next week. It’s always good to win on Sunday.”

What it means going forward

Arkansas improved to 32-17 overall and 13-11 in SEC play with the series win, moving into a tie for sixth place in the conference standings.

Ole Miss fell to 12-12 in league play and slipped into a tie for ninth. With two weeks left in the regular season the margin for error is basically gone.

The top eight seeds in the SEC don’t have to play on the opening day of the tournament in Hoover, Alabama and right now the Hogs are sitting right on the bubble.

Sunday was a gut check. It showed that when the crowd gets loud and the moment gets big this team doesn’t always collapse, sometimes it produces a 19-year-old freshman who nods confidently at his own dugout after a foul ball and then crushes the next pitch into the Fayetteville evening.

“I really believe this team deserved to win a game like that,” Van Horn said, “because we have not really won a game like that in all the games we played. Sometimes you’ve just got to have a break and somebody has to step up and those two hitters in the ninth did it.”

Whether they can do it consistently over the next two weeks is the real question.

Sunday answered it for one afternoon at least.