The Tennessee Volunteers will reach the midway mark of their Southeastern Conference regular-season schedule Sunday afternoon at Arkansas.
They will do so having lost four of their five league series.
Tennessee fell to the Razorbacks 6-3 Saturday night inside Baum-Walker Stadium after losing 5-2 Friday night. No. 5 Arkansas improved to 28-7 overall and to 10-4 in SEC play, while the No. 16 Vols fell to 23-12 and to 5-9.
Chase Dollander, normally the series starter for the Vols, took the mound Saturday night and worked into the fifth inning while allowing just two hits.
Jared Dickey hit a leadoff home run to right field for a second straight night, but a Jace Bohrofen two-run homer to right-center later in the first put the Hogs ahead to stay. A dropped fly ball in left field by the Vols in the fifth inning enabled Arkansas to extend its lead to 3-1, but a Blake Burke homer to left in the sixth made it 3-2.
Dollander tallied six strikeouts in the first three innings but took another loss in this hard-luck season in falling to 4-4.
“The starter’s job is to come out of the game and give us a chance to win,” Tennessee coach Tony Vitello told reporters afterward. “He certainly put us in a position to do that. It was a clash of the titans in the first inning that did not go his way, but the rest of the time he was fantastic.
“We could have made a play behind him and we didn’t.”
Former Cleveland High School standout Cam Sewell worked out of trouble in the sixth to keep it a 3-2 game, but a pickoff attempt at third base in the seventh got into left field and allowed Arkansas to take a 4-2 lead.
Tennessee, which will start Drew Beam in Sunday afternoon’s finale, has not won a series in Fayetteville since 1996.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.