Kevin Patterson hasn’t seen many fastballs this year after mashing a home run every 7.8 at-bats last season.

And if he keeps hitting changeups as far as he did against Arkansas on Saturday, he probably won’t see many more of those either.

Patterson came up with the bases loaded for the second straight game and one-upped his three-run double from Friday night, socking a grand slam over the right-center field wall that sparked a six-run fourth inning in Auburn’s 9-5 win over the Razorbacks at Plainsman Park.

“He threw me two (changeups) in a row, fouled the first one off, and I figured I wasn’t going to really see a fastball,” Patterson said. “I just tried to stay back on it.

“I was a little ahead of the first one, and got ahold of the second one.”

No. 24 Auburn (13-6, 1-1 SEC) went into its big inning down 2-0 after a Bo Bigham RBI single and an RBI double from Sam Bates got No. 9 Arkansas (15-3, 1-1) on the board first.

The Tigers loaded the bases on two singles and a hit batsman to start the fourth, and Tony Caldwell pushed their first run across with an RBI single.

Then Patterson, who finished the day 2-for-3, put a changeup over Frank Thomas’ picture on the wall, giving him seven RBI in the first two games of the series against Arkansas.

“Any hitter wants to be up in a big situation, especially when you’re starting to feel good about yourself, starting to see the ball real well,” Patterson said. “We’re clicking right now as an offense, and we’ve just got to keep rolling.”

Will Irvin, making his first weekend start of the season for the Tigers, started rolling on the mound after Auburn’s offensive outburst, giving up no runs on a hit in his final two innings before yielding way to the bullpen.

Irvin (3-0) gave up two runs on seven hits over six innings, striking out five.

Tigers coach John Pawlowski said the outing earned the junior college transfer another look next weekend.

“He battled hard,” Pawlowski said. “He kept going out there, gave us some innings to work with and got us deep into the game.

“We haven’t had that in a while. We’re pretty excited about what he did.”

Auburn tacked on two more runs in the fifth on a double by Creede Simpson that snapped a 1-for-19 slump, then made the score 9-2 on a Simpson sacrifice fly that scored Caldwell in the seventh.

Arkansas pushed across three runs in the ninth off reliever Sean Ray before Zach Blatt stopped the bleeding with a pop out to short, earning his second save of the year.

“Our goal was to come out and compete today, try to do everything we possibly could to even the series up,” Pawlowski said. “We did that.”

Casey McElroy extended his hitting streak to 14 games with a 3-for-5 performance, and Wes Gilmer’s bunt single in the fourth extended his hit streak to 13 games.

Matt Reynolds was 2-for-4 with two RBI for the Razorbacks, and Bigham and Kyle Robinson were each 2-for-4 with an RBI.

Auburn sends Derek Varnadore (3-0, 2.79 ERA) to the mound today at 1 p.m., trying to take a winning conference record out of its SEC-opening weekend.

“You’ve just got to keep fighting, that’s the way this league is,” Patterson said. “We know what we can do. We’ve just got to keep fighting through it.”
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