If you’ve paid any attention to the Kansas baseball team this spring, you already know one thing is crystal clear.
These guys are having fun.
Winning is fun, of course, and no one’s done it much better than the Jayhawks in the last 31 days, when Dan Fitzgerald’s team has won 17 of 18 games and surged into first place atop the Big 12 standings with three conference series weekends remaining.
Beyond that, the Jayhawks have vaulted into the Top 12 in the national RPI rankings and sit at No. 11 in both major college baseball polls, bringing the idea of hosting postseason baseball at Hoglund Ballpark very much into the picture.
The whole thing would be unbelievable if you hadn’t seen what Fitzgerald and company had done the previous two seasons. And now that they’ve kept it rolling for a third straight season — after finishing his first year at KU with a late surge, as well — you should be starting to get the picture.
It’s been largely new faces each year, but those faces have taken the same approach. Be a great teammate and compete your tail off. If you do those two things, winning usually comes.
Another one of Fitzgerald’s big philosophies has been his heavy reliance on juco players. In the last three season at Kansas, Fitz and company have rostered between 22-25 former juco guys per season, turning more than a dozen of them into all-Big 12-type players.
Some of them have flat-out become stars. And one of the biggest reasons behind that is the fact that none of them have forgotten where they came from.
“Juco's a grind,” KU junior Dylan Schlotterback said. “And it was so much fun playing at the junior college level, and it really prepared us for this level, teaching us how to grind and just, when things may not go your way, just keep fighting and keep fighting and keep grinding. And it's, it's been working out well for us.”
Added Fitzgerald: “The thing that you have to have to be successful in junior college is you have to love playing baseball. Because there's no pomp and circumstance, there's no flare; pregame meals, postgame meals, like, those aren't things. You are just grinding it out, and you have to love playing baseball, and you have to love competing and you have to love bus rides.”
When guys who fit that bill arrive in the shiny new world of Division I baseball, they bring those traits with them but jump at the chance to take advantage of all of the insane resources they now have at their disposal.
Shortstop Tyson LeBlanc, who is having the best power-hitting season of his life, said the instant feedback about how hard he hit a ball in his last swing has been a huge part of his success.
Even if he hit a laser right at somebody or watched a towering fly ball die at the wall, the numbers often will show that his exit velocity off of the barrel of the bat was right where he wanted it, and that leads to him thinking that it was still a successful at-bat.
In the juco ranks, it was just an out.
“If you really want to get good at baseball in 2026, you have to have an awareness of what the metrics say and what the data says,” Fitzgerald said.
He then made sure to point out that that can be true but to varying degrees.
Take the comparison between juniors Brady Ballinger and Dylan Schlotterback, both juco guys themselves.
“Dylan has hundreds of thousands of his swings videoed and he's incredibly bright and he breaks that stuff down and he's got his own tripod that he can travel with to set up his phone,” Fitzgerald said of Schlotterback’s love of all things analytics. “And, you know, I’m fairly certain that Brady Ballinger does not have a tripod. They’re very, very different personalities, but both of them have a fundamental understanding of this is what I do and, when I'm on, this is what it looks like.”
“They so appreciate all the resources and all the things we’re blessed with,” Fitzgerald added.
And it’s not just the Trackman technology — which dubs itself to be “data and actionable insights” — and other such number generators that all of these one-time juco guys appreciate.
“Trackman is great, but our managers, I love our managers,” Schlotterback said. “They do so much for us, and it's that's probably the most underrated part of being here, is our managers. They take great care of us, and it's super cool having them.”
There might still be even one more resource that stands out above all others.
“I think they love the food,” Fitzgerald joked. “These guys can really, really eat.”
Over the weekend, the Jayhawks ate Wildcat, three times to be exact, picking up their first road sweep of in-state rival Kansas State by winning 9-7 to win for the third time in three days in Manhattan. KU took the opener 18-6 in a 7-inning run-rule victory and then won Game 2, 10-8.
That moved them to 33-11 overall and 17-4 in Big 12 play, three games ahead of second place with nine Big 12 games to play — 3 versus Arizona this weekend at Hoglund Ballpark, 3 at home against West Virginia the following weekend and 3 more at BYU to close the regular season.
Thirty-one days ago, they woke up 16-10.
The momentum they have gained in that stretch has made them one of the hottest teams in the country. And one of the biggest things that led to it was the fact that these guys were not afraid to have fun.
Dugout cams and huge bling after home runs. On-field antics and celebrations that don’t always land well in the other dugout. And unending belief and support of their teammates in good times and bad.
It’s all led to the run they’re currently on and this certainly does not look like a team that plans on slowing down anytime soon.
“Our confidence is high,” junior right-handed pitcher Manning West (another former juco guy) said last week before the K-State sweep. “We’ve just been competing and taking it day by day and just building off each other, and it's been a blast.”
