Ready and willing

Kansas baseball coach Dan Fitzgerald has not reached this point in his career without having a strong understanding of who his players are, what they need to be doing and how they’ve gone about making it happen. 

That fact is what makes his recent comments about his starting infield all the more mind-blowing. 

“I have to remind myself to go out of my way to talk to them,” the KU coach said of starting infielders Josh Dykhoff (1B), Cade Baldridge (2B), Tyson LeBlanc (SS) and Dylan Schlotterback (3B). “I rarely have anything to say to them because they're so low maintenance and they just show up and they do their work.”

It’s not just the fact that Dykhoff, Baldridge, LeBlanc and Schlotterback own four of the team’s top six batting averages and have combined for 43 home runs and 171 RBIs to date while averaging barely five errors a piece in the field that has had Fitzgerald in awe. 

It’s the way each one of them — both individually and collectively as a unit — goes about preparing for the grind of the season, in practice, on so-called off days and a couple of hours before each game’s first pitch. 

“Those four are so steady and so consistent,” Fitzgerald explained earlier this week. 

Every team and each player throughout the country has a pregame routine they follow that gets them locked in and tries to simulate at least part of what they’ll see in the nine innings to follow. But Fitzgerald said this quartet makes sure to consider everything. 

“They make every play,” Fitzgerald said. “And I mean every play.”

They work double-play shifts, they simulate balls hit deep into the hole, they practice taking away doubles and whatever other scenario they can imagine. 

It leads to hundreds of ground balls at the highest intensity level, without sacrificing attention to detail or sprinting to each spot for a single rep. 

“Honestly, I find myself just watching them prepare,” Fitzgerald said. “It's so enjoyable to watch them go about how they do it. Their ability to lock in on that has set an example for all our guys.”

The fourth-year KU coach called them “incredible” and “a fine-tuned machine” in terms of how seriously they take their jobs. He added that those four infielders in particular have been “absolutely amazing” to watch in their pursuit of total preparedness. 

Dykhoff scoffs at the notion that any of them are doing anything special. 

“At the end of the day, it’s just working hard,” the senior first baseman said. “Especially defensively in baseball, doing extra work, a bunch of stuff on the side, especially in the infield, the little things will show in the game.” 

"Honestly, I find myself just watching them prepare. It's so enjoyable to watch them go about how they do it."

— Kansas baseball coach Dan Fitzgerald on his 4 starting infielders

Dykhoff added that the extra time they have spent on those little things helped the group of new faces and several others around them build a bond that makes it seem like they’ve played together for much longer than nine months. 

Beyond that, Fitzgerald said the extra work helps make up for the limited practice time these guys actually get, with games on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and the NCAA’s mandatory off day on Monday for most of the season. 

“We really only have Wednesday and Thursday to practice,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s not nearly enough. So you have to look at gamedays as you have a practice and then you play a game. And our guys, from Day 1, have been all business during (batting practice and in the field).”

They say you play like you practice and it’s been clear throughout this historic Kansas baseball season that the tone set by those guys seven days a week has played a huge role in KU sitting in first place in the Big 12 Conference entering the final weekend of the regular season. 

Again, though, no one on this roster has looked at the work as anything other than what’s required to get where they want to go. 

Dykhoff laughed at the idea of calling Monday an off day. Technically, it has been. And the coaches have not held any formal or informal practice sessions on those days. 

But bright and early most Monday mornings, no matter how the previous series went, the training room was full, the clubhouse was packed and there were Jayhawks on the field finding ways to get their own work in to try to get better. 

“On our team, I think we’re just full of a bunch of leaders,” Dykhoff said. “In my opinion, we kind of all just do the right thing.” 

On Thursday night in Provo, Utah, after an 0-4 week that was without a doubt a shock to the system of a team that had won 27 of its last 30 games before that, doing the thing again got the Jayhawks back on the right track via a 9-6 win at BYU.

LeBlanc homered for the 18th time this season, bringing him within three jacks of tying the school record. And Dykhoff added a pair of home runs as the Jayhawks found their bats after watching them go quiet last week.

Thursday's win, which featured KU (38-15 overall, 21-7 Big 12) setting a school record for strikeouts in a season with 512 (and counting), inched the Jayhawks closer to winning their first ever Big 12 regular season crown.

Only West Virginia (36-12, 20-8) can now catch KU in the standings.

So, now it’s down to two more regular season games at BYU before postseason play arrives. Win one and the Jayhawks clinch at least a share of the Big 12 title with the Mountaineers. Win both and the trophy is theirs alone. Even just one win could clinch the outright title depending on the outcome of WVU's final two games against TCU.

Friday’s KU-BYU game is slated for a 7 p.m. first pitch, with the series finale scheduled for 2 p.m. (central) on Saturday.

— For tickets to all KU athletic events, visit kuathletics.com