photo by: Mike Gunnoe/Special to the Journal-World

Kansas junior Alex Breckheimer releases a pitch against Nebraska at Hoglund Ballpark Tuesday, April 8, 2025.

Bryant & Stratton College has 16 campuses with seven athletic departments, four of which have teams currently playing baseball baseball, and at least one search engine considers its Virginia and Ohio outposts more salient than the Wisconsin program, nestled in the Milwaukee suburbs, where Alex Breckheimer pitched for two seasons.

The Bobcats are not necessarily salient to the Division I baseball world either. When the right-handed pitcher Breckheimer pledged his services to the University of Kansas in March 2024, he became his program’s first-ever power-conference recruit.

“He’s at a junior college that’s not heavily recruited,” KU pitching coach Brandon Scott told the Journal-World. “He’s as under the radar as you could possibly get. And you’re just willing to take a chance. Here at Kansas we’re just willing to take a chance on guys like that, if you look at our track record.”

Just because Dan Fitzgerald’s staff has prioritized junior-college recruiting — to the point that it has assembled the top JUCO class in the nation three years running — “doesn’t mean they have to come from the top 10 junior colleges in the country,” Scott said.

“You find a guy like that that’s got serious projection who throws strikes with a fastball, and you just dream (of) what comes after that,” he added.

Since the start of April, Breckheimer has allowed just two earned runs in 11 2/3 innings. Newly installed as KU’s closer, he earned saves in two of the Jayhawks’ three wins over Kansas State last weekend.

“Luckily for us,” Scott said, “sometimes dreams come true.”

Looking at Breckheimer, it is both easy to see how he recently threw 98 mph in a game for the first time and difficult to believe that he did not draw more attention from scouts and recruiters. The righty, whom his teammates quickly nicknamed “Fridge” upon his arrival in Lawrence, is every bit of 6-foot-5 and 270 pounds.

“He’s so physical,” Fitzgerald said. “You guys have been next to him. Try to make sure Lance (Leipold) never meets him, because he’d be awfully good on that line.”

Breckheimer did indeed play football in high school in Chilton, Wisconsin, though he was not always that imposing, as a skinnier high schooler. In fact, he was a quarterback and linebacker.

While he vaguely aspired to play college baseball, he said he didn’t grow up watching a lot of the sport and didn’t think much in a practical sense about playing at the next level until some junior colleges took interest in him when he was competing for his junior-year summer-ball team.

“Never really thought about making it to where I am now,” he told the Journal-World. “I just kind of got there (to Bryant & Stratton) and kind of did what they told me to, listened to them, really bought in.”

He grew with the aid of a lifting program implemented by his coaches, and over the course of his two years playing at Wisconsin Brewing Company Park in Oconomowoc, Breckheimer started in 13 of his 22 appearances, tallying a 3.63 ERA and 9-6 record in 104 total innings pitched.

It took until midway through his sophomore year for Breckheimer’s recruitment to heat up.

“I was just a guy,” he said. “I was up to 92, I think, at that time. Had a great summer in the Northwoods (League), but not really many teams showed interest in me.”

Quite fortuitously, a scout who was close with Fitzgerald saw him pitch and put in a good word with the KU program.

In mid-March, KU’s itinerant recruiting coordinator Jon Coyne came out to see Breckheimer take on Kankakee Community College. He played well and impressed Coyne with his ability to fill up the strike zone, although one of his lasting impressions of the day was that “one of my buddies out in left field, he made a diving play for a ball and completely missed it and landed on the ball.”

“Coyne loved that,” Breckheimer said. “He thought it was just really funny … Coyne was really excited for me to get here and just see what I could do with a defense that can really back me up, because a lot of the hits I had there were just kind of bloop singles that really sucked, but I got here and we have amazing defense. None of that stuff really happens anymore.”

Breckheimer committed to KU at the end of March and joined the Jayhawks for the fall ahead of the 2025 season. Of his status as Bryant & Stratton’s most prominent recent recruit, Breckheimer said, “I know there’s a lot of eyes on me.”

“I still talk with my coaches from there every now and then, and they’re always confident in me,” he added. “They always text me after my outings, just seeing how I’m doing. They just love to see me succeed.”

Scott said it was easy to project that “as he gets more comfortable with his body, gets stronger with his body, he’s going to throw strikes, he’s going to be 95, 96.” But he also admitted that he did not necessarily see Breckheimer as a go-to back-end option right away. He might have been third or fourth in line for the closer spot at first.

“You used to go meet with a kid, you meet with them 10 times, you go to his house, you have two visits, back when I was coaching mid-major and junior college,” Scott said. “Well, nowadays, we get on the phone with a kid, we have six hours to make a decision sometimes. You don’t know their makeup. Well, with Breck, he was one of those guys … you love the stuff, you love the projection, but how does he compete, how does he handle failure?

“And that sucker has handled it really well. And that’s what makes him a good bullpen piece for us.”

Added Breckheimer: “I’m doing a lot better than what I kind of thought, if that makes sense.”

The righty’s ERA is now down to 2.96 after his latest scoreless ninth inning on Tuesday against Nebraska. Generally, Breckheimer has handled his high-usage late-inning high-leverage role with aplomb, though he did acknowledge a certain “adrenaline rush” that helped him reach 98 mph against K-State.

“You’re still pitching, it’s still the same thing that you do if you go in in the third inning or the fifth inning,” he said. “You’re just going out there, getting three outs is the main thing, doesn’t matter how you get them as long as you get three without letting anyone score.”

Fitzgerald said Breckheimer “always wants the ball.”

“He always says he can pitch, which is certainly not true — no pitcher can always pitch,” Fitzgerald said. “But he always says that he can, and I think that great closers, and great back-end guys, great relievers, they want the ball all the time. So he checks all the boxes.”

Scott credited KU’s strength and nutrition programs for Breckheimer’s development.

“I think his 270 has changed since he’s been here,” Scott said. “He lost some baby fat, he’s put on some muscle, and you’re seeing that — not just with the velo maintaining, you’re also seeing it in his durability, the ability to come back and do this three times a week. There is an art to pitching out of the bullpen, and he seems to have taken onto that.”

Continued growth will in part depend on Breckheimer’s ability to throw his slider and get it up reliably toward 85 or 86 mph. As Scott puts it, “You come in and the game’s on the line, it’s really easy to go straight to that heater.” When Breckheimer hasn’t done so it hasn’t always worked; Scott let him throw a breaking ball with the bases loaded against Oklahoma State and it resulted in a key ninth-inning run on a wild pitch.

“We had to learn in some tough times there,” Scott said. “Now we came back and won the game and he pitched his butt off in the next two innings, but it’s not a pitch that’s polished. It’s something that’s still in development.”

The next chance for Breckheimer to display his ongoing development is KU’s Big 12 series on the road at Utah. First pitch on Friday is set for 7 p.m. Central Time.